Wake Up Dead
by notmanos
Summary: Post X3: The dead start flooding the streets of L.A., and Angel and Logan have to find out what's going on before it starts to spread.
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: The character of Wolverine is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. The characters of Angel & Buffy the Vampire Slayer are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy. Bob and his crew are mine, and have retained legal services, so don't touch._

_N.B.: Takes place after "X3" - this is my attempt to sort out some of the mess, as frankly I didn't like the movie at all, which is why I've avoided it for so long. I'm going to attempt to address a plot hole or two, and if you don't like it … well, I tried._

* * *

WAKE UP DEAD

* * *

1

Looking at the morgue, she wondered if it would make a decent horror movie setting anymore.

The morgue had been redesigned to make it look different from the hospital. Up above, the halls of Saint Joseph's were painted a soothing blue, with multicolor lines on the soft white floor leading towards different wings, different sections. The morgue, in what was called "the basement" (but wasn't really), had been redesigned to look totally different, futuristic and cold, all stainless steel and hard white, like an arctic tundra. You couldn't mistake the morgue for any other part of the hospital - it was like a different world entirely. It was walking out of the warm comfort of chaos and into the chilling stare of ultimate order.

But the smell - oh yeah, that could be a horror movie itself.

Rachel Choi only really noticed it when first stepping into the morgue from somewhere else. They did all they could to hide the smell of preserving chemicals and decaying flesh, but there was only so much you could do. The smell bothered her a bit while she could smell it, but after she was down here for a while she got used to it and didn't smell it anymore. It was amazing what a person could get used to, given time.

With a sigh, she saw there was no new papers on her desk, although there was a new gurney in the corridor. She walked over to see if the clipboard was there, but it wasn't. She lifted the white sheet to have a look at the new body in her realm. It was a small white man, his flesh the strangely waxy cast of the recently dead, and so skinny she could guess his cause of death - cancer or AIDS, some disease that wasted a body away, ate a person from the inside out, left the skin a taut yellowish covering pulled tight over prominent bones. He had mottled patches that could have been bruises from IVs or treatments or melanomas or other forms of cancer - since most of them were lower on his body she couldn't tell without stripping off the sheet. But there was no paperwork, and she figured one of the new interns was sent down here with the body, a kind of hazing ritual, and was so freaked out that he or she forgot to bring the paperwork with them. That was all she pretty much did down here - paperwork. She wasn't the coroner, just an assistant; a glorified nurse, really, only a nurse for dead people. At least she didn't have to worry about one of them impatiently ringing a buzzer.

She pulled the sheet back over the dead man, and walked back to her desk. She called back up to the main unit, and let Paca know that some idiot newbie brought a body down without papers while she was off on her lunch break. She told her to get that idiot to bring that stuff down as soon as possible, and maybe give him or her a little kick in the ass whilst doing it. The new ones were always terrified of the morgue, often of dead bodies, but after a while they got used to it and shook all the horror movie conventions they grew up with. Nothing ever happened in a morgue besides paperwork, identifications, transportation, and autopsies. There were no zombie rampages, no reanimated corpses running amok - in fact, that might have broken up the boredom. There was never anything but the occasional devastated family member, and the ever present, pervasive smell of chemical death.

She was searching her desk drawer for her favorite pen - it had a little skull and crossbones motif, which always seemed a little too on the nose for her line of work - and when she found it she sat back in her chair, which creaked like a squeaky hinge, and noticed movement out of the corner of her eye. She though it was just a vague reflection of her own movements in hazy stainless steel, but when she looked, she saw that the man on the gurney was sitting up, sheet pooled around his waist, looking at his own hands as if he didn't recognize them.

She was so stunned, so sure she wasn't seeing what she thought she was seeing, that she just stared. The man finally looked up and saw her, and his eyes had a slightly yellowish cast that suggested he had jaundice before he died. "Can you tell me what's going on?" he asked, his voice a rusty scratch from lack of use.

It took her a moment to find her voice. "Umm, what?"

"I'm a seventy eight year old woman," the man said in his raspy voice. "Jane Washington. I'm a grandmother of six, with skin as black as coffee. I do believe the high blood pressure finally killed me. So what the hell am I doing in a little white man's body?"

Rachel just stared at the man, not sure she was processing any of this. Did she just have some really bad fish at the sushi place? Or was there a dead man talking to her? A dead man having some kind of a psychotic break?

This day had suddenly gotten a lot more interesting.

* * *

Angel wasn't sure what woke him up at first, but something had. He sat on the edge of his bed and waited, listening, but there were no noises except for the occasional whispery howl of the wind outside.

The Santa Anas were probably coming in, harbingers of the fire season, and the bedroom window wasn't as tightly weather stripped as it should have been, so high winds always leaked in around the edges. He actually found the sound oddly comforting at times. It was such an expensive apartment, one much nicer than anything he'd ever bother to get on his own, that it was good to know that there was a flaw in it.

The blinds were pulled, and dark paper was taped to the window panes, but even beyond all of that, he could see a slight glow of light at the edges, a suggestion of daylight beyond the walls. He thought he could feel it, but he was so groggy he wasn't sure. He'd been working both days and nights lately, screwing up his sleep schedule beyond immediate retrieval. He probably needed two solid days of sleep to get back on track once more.

He padded out to the spacious living room, and while it seemed empty, devoid of people, he got the slight shivery feeling that he wasn't alone. It was a supernatural feeling too, not his sixth sense for knowing when a Human with tasty blood in their veins was in his proximity. This was a feeling that some other creature that shouldn't be was invading his space.

He let his vampire side out, feeling the shift of bones in his face, his vision tunneling to that of the hunt, but as he sniffed the air and turned, he came face to face with what he was searching for.

"You know this is wrong," Lila Morgan insisted, not at all off put by his vampiric appearance. The dead lawyer did look him up and down, though, as he was only wearing boxer shorts, and when she looked back up at him, it was with a slightly sardonic smile. "If you want to be an intimidating vampire, maybe you should wear some pants."

He let his face shift back, and he crossed his arms over his chest. "What the hell do your bosses want with me? Don't they take no for an answer? Or didn't we put enough of your people in the hospital last time?"

She rolled her eyes, and nervously fingered the scarf around her neck, presumably hiding the puncture wound in her neck that killed her. But since she was a ghost, he had no idea why the wound would even be there. Then again, there were different rules for different ghosts, and he got confused by them all. Some physically manifested; some didn't, but could still manipulate objects; others could manifest but couldn't manipulate objects; some could move around at liberty; some were stuck in certain places or with certain objects. Usually only a Watcher could keep track of all the arcane rules, and even then they usually needed access to their library. "Didn't you hear me? I'm not supposed to be here. I wasn't sent here by Wolfram and Hart."

He'd started walking back to his bedroom to find some pants, but that made him stop. He looked back at her, scratching his head. "What stupid new game is this?"

He didn't know how a ghost could click her tongue impatiently, but she managed. "Do you know where I suddenly manifested? At a fucking strip mall. Apparently that's where the Hyperion used to be. I had to walk here, and I was never sure if anyone saw me or not. At least I can walk through walls."

He stared at Lila, trying to figure out why she'd be making up such a story. Of all the sleazebag lawyers in Wolfram and Hart, she was usually pretty forthright in her scumbaggery. (Okay, that wasn't a word, but Angel honestly felt it should have been, if only in Los Angeles.) "How did you know where I was if Wolfram and Hart didn't tell you?"

"Some of the other ghosts told me."

Now he was staring at her, wondering if he was still asleep. He slapped himself across the face to make sure.

Lila raised a well shaped eyebrow at him. "I always knew you were into S & M."

Okay, yes - he was awake, and this was the real Lila Morgan. "What do you mean the other ghosts told you?"

She flung an arm angrily towards the blacked out window wall. "Haven't you looked outside?! It's - oh, it's daytime."

"Nice of you to remember after chiding me about being a vampire."

She scowled at him. "You don't have to be a smart ass. Do you know what the Senior Partners will do to me if they think I broke protocol and came back on my own?"

"Do you have the power to do that?"

"No." Her eyes darted around furtively, as if searching for recording devices. "But there are ways around everything if you know where to look."

"Spoken like a true lawyer."

"I'll take that as a compliment. You know, Angel, I'm actually impressed. I didn't think your tastes were this expensive."

"They're not. Logan gave me this apartment."

Her eyes goggled in genuine shock. "Logan? As in Logan a/k/a Weapon X, a/k/a Wolverine Logan? The homeless homicidal freak who doesn't seem to know grunge is dead?"

Angel frowned at her description of Logan, which was needlessly harsh. He wasn't homicidal. "He inherited it from a Triad gang leader and gave it to me. Don't ask, just accept it."

His phone started ringing then, and he gave her a wary look as he crossed the plush living room carpet to grab the handset. Yes, it was a really nice place if he thought about it, but since he was usually only here to sleep, shower, or get dressed, he hadn't had much time to appreciate it lately. He still didn't understand what Lila's game was here, and he really would have believed he was dreaming if his cheek still wasn't stinging from the slap. "Yeah?" he said into the receiver, stifling a yawn. How much sleep had he gotten - two hours? Three?

"Angel?" Bren asked, sounding strangely nervous. That instantly put him on edge. "Sorry to wake you, but you really need to get down to the office now."

"What's wrong?" He asked, as Lila turned to look at him with interest, and a very smug smile.

"Umm, well … I don't know how to put this."

"Think of a way."

"Okay. I don't want to sound melodramatic, but it looks like the streets are filling up with dead people."

He shot a harsh look at Lila, who continued grinning smugly. "See? I told you I wasn't alone."

Oh bloody hell.

* * *

Logan sat at the counter of the diner, picking at his huevos rancheros and idly conversing in Spanish with the plump, pleasantly looking waitress currently in charge of the place. She actually wanted to practice her English on him, but he was telling her of the usage of some odd English phrases, such as women - like her boss - saying "don't bust my balls" when she clearly didn't have balls. He forgot how fun a language English could be at times.

He hadn't been back in California since that Magneto nonsense, and it was kind of weird. He wasn't sure he was ready to face San Francisco yet, but Los Angeles was pleasant in its blasé attitude and familiar strangeness. He was nothing here but another freak in a town chock full of them, and the open faced waitress, whose name tag said "Lucia", just saw him as a strange Caucasian who was perfectly fluent in her native tongue.

The bell over the door chimed, and he knew before he looked back that one of them had arrived. He glanced over his shoulder, and standing in the doorway, looking healthily muscular and fit in jeans, a sleeveless black t-shirt, and weather inappropriate black leather jacket, was Sid. In his one nod to the bright, hot day, he was wearing mirrored sunglasses, which he quickly took off. "Hey Logan," he said, smiling, and joined him at the counter. Sid didn't attempt to hug him, and he appreciated that.

Sid had been working with Marc for the past six months - well, with Marc and his boyfriend, Matthias Gosteli. As it turned out, Matthias was a mutant, and according to e-mails Sid had sent him, Matthias had recognized "Wolverine" on sight, but was afraid to talk to him due to his "reputation". (Oh, how fun was this?) But seeing him with Marc had made him warm up to him, mainly because he thought he and Marc were a couple, because they seemed so relaxed and comfortable around each other. Marc had, of course, found this hilarious.

Matt - and both Marc and Sid referred to him as Matt - had control over water, or anything in liquid form really. It was a self-admitted "stupid power" without much use, but Marc had been trying to help him figure out uses for it. According to Sid, he once made the tide go out, and that was "pretty cool", but that seemed to be the extent of his powers to date.

Matt was a nice guy, according to Sid, and they'd been helping him with his English, which was actually pretty good since he tended bar at a hotel with lots of Western tourists, and he found helping Marc "thrilling". According to Marc, Matt though of him as "kind of like a black James Bond - but sexier". Logan just bet Marc added that last bit.

They'd heard about what happened and were worried about him, although he had no idea why. They just finished up the job they were stuck on when all this shit happened, and had flown in today from Russia. "Marc thought I should go on ahead," Sid explained, as he slipped up onto the stool beside him. Lucia came by, and Sid politely ordered a glass of ice tea. When she went to get it, he said, "It's still weird to think of them as dead."

"I know."

"I'm sorry we couldn't be here to help."

He shrugged. "We coulda used ya, kid, but that's the way it goes. Besides, what could you have done?" Actually, it would have been nice to have a guy he knew could hand to hand combat fight with the best of them - and with impenetrable skin to boot - guarding his back and protecting the weaker fighters, but hey, they managed. Mostly. "It's okay. You got your own life to lead. How is it?"

"My life?" he seemed startled by that question, and it showed that not that much had changed with Sid. "It's okay. Industrial espionage is more complicated than I thought, as well as more lucrative. And Marc has taught me a few things … many of which I'd rather forget." After that, he flashed him a brief, bright smile. That was different - and welcome.

Logan gave him a faint smile in return and a friendly clap on the back. He wanted to ruffle his hair, but that would be condescending. Especially since he could smell he was packing heat.

They talked about Rogue until Marc and Matt came in. Sid was shocked that she took the cure, he saw it as a form of "self-mutilation", and while he did basically agree with him, he also saw it as her choice to make. She had intended to stay at the mansion, but the last time he was there, he helped her pack up for her move back home. Logan couldn't help but think _"now you want her back because she's not a freak anymore"_,but he never said it to her or even hinted at it. Again, she was an adult, and she could make her own decisions, even if he disagreed with them.

When Marc came in, he sarcastically bellowed, "Hairy!" Logan gave him an evil look for that, but Marc hugged him anyways, giving him a manly slap on the back. He looked good as well, wearing a sleeveless dark blue muscle shirt that showed off his muscular chest, and a lightweight duster that helped conceal some of the armaments he was currently carrying. Yeah, he could have used Marc there too - he could fight, he was strong, he could improvise, and he had an actual sense of humor, which, while occasionally annoying, was still a help - but oh well. Matt trailed behind, smiling politely and awkwardly, waiting for official introductions.

Matt was the same excellent example of Nordic genes - clear skinned, fair, with white-blond hair and bluer than blue eyes, tall and lean - but he was dressed like any number of questionable guys you might encounter in West Hollywood, in a red tank top and khaki walking shorts, black sunglasses covering his eyes, his blond hair artfully tousled. His arms were lean but fairly well muscled - realistically, not like he spent hours in the gym - and he had a tattoo on his right upper arm, a band encircling his arm with a somewhat jagged tribal design. He looked just like the boy toy he probably was.

Marc introduced them, though, and they shook hands, and Matt smiled nervously, saying he was a "big fan", a puzzling comment that made him want to snap, _"What the fuck do you think I am, an actor?" _But he didn't, because he still made the kid nervous, even though Marc had surely told him you couldn't believe everything you saw about him on YouTube. (Most of those clips were taken out of context.)

The four of them moved to a window booth, with Matt and Marc sitting on one side, and he and Sid sitting across from them. They all had tea, and they talked about everything but what they actually wanted to talk about. Marc wasn't going to talk about Jean in front of Matt, a stranger to their world, and maybe not in front of Sid, who was not a stranger, but wasn't as privy to his complicated history with Jean as Marc was. Logan simply listened as they told him how screwed up their gig in Russia got, which was supposed to be a simple job for a corporation, but had them coming up against Russian gangsters. As Sid put it rather succinctly, "They won't be bothering us anymore." Oh, he just bet.

Matt got more comfortable and talked a bit, although it was clear he was picking up on the tension, the things not being said. "So I've been thinking," Matt said, in his musically accented voice. A Swiss accent was actually oddly lyrical, and not at all like the "Swedish chef" caricature that most Americans knew. "You all have great code names: Wolverine, Scorpion, Saracen. I know my powers are lame, but I thought I could have a cool code name. I've thought of a couple, and wanted to run them by you."

The three of them all looked at each other, and Logan shrugged for the group. "Sure, go ahead."

"What about Tsunami?"

Logan grimaced. "Insensitive."

Since Matt looked confused, Marc added, "Especially in Southern Asia."

He got it. "Oh … yeah, I guess so." Matt paused briefly, glancing down at the tabletop. "Okay. What about Tidal?"

Marc shook his head. "Sounds like "title". It'll confuse the hell out of everyone."

"Umm, I guess so. Huh. This is harder than I thought."

"What about Riptide?" Sid suggested, trying to be helpful.

Marc shook his head again. "Crappy '80's t.v. show."

"Oh, was it?" Sid still needed to catch up on his pop culture references, especially the American ones. But Logan felt this one must have been obscure, because even he didn't know what Marc was referring to.

Sid tried again, sticking to a water theme. "Undertow?"

"Tool album," Logan pointed out. "But it was a good one, though. So throw that in the "maybe" pile."

Matt considered that, frowning at his glass of tea. He was a good looking kid, but what was he, twenty five at the oldest? He had to tease Marc about robbing the cradle, just like Marc did to him when he was dating Faith. "There really aren't a lot of macho water based terms, are there?"

"Not really," Marc commiserated. "Don't worry, we'll think of somethin' for you eventually."

Logan couldn't suppress the smile as he said, "Aren't you overlooking the most obvious one? Aquaman." He could barely hold back the laugh until it was out of his mouth, and then he couldn't hold it back anymore.

Matt gave him a dirty look. "I don't talk to fish."

Marc frowned at him, and gave him a light kick under the table. "Hey, that's my man you're dissing."

"Sorry, sorry. I just couldn't resist the joke."

Sid looked slightly baffled. "Who's Aquaman?"

This set off a new round of laughter, but at least this time everyone joined in - except Sid, who really didn't get the reference. What a limited life he had in Rhajan. Oh sure, he knew every form of martial arts known to mankind, but nowadays the knowledge of stupid cartoon characters was likely to get you farther.

That was when a strange feeling crawled up Logan's spine. It was a sense of being watched, but a familiar one - and not earthly. He looked behind them, near the door of the diner, which hadn't opened … and yet, he was positive someone had come in.

"What is it, bud?" Marc asked, and he heard the fake vinyl of the bench seat creak as he craned his neck to see what he was looking at. "Okay, what the fuck is that? I'm getting a heat differential, but no one's there."

"Differential in what sense?" Sid asked, sounding wary, like he was getting ready to assume battle posture.

"A cold spot, a heat sink in a vaguely humanoid shape. It's moving."

"It's a ghost," Logan told them. He'd gotten this odd creepy feeling of being watched before, namely in that hidden Watcher's library in London, which was tended by the ghostly librarian Anna.

"Are you serious?" Matt asked.

Suddenly an empty coffee cup that had been sitting on the end of the counter was picked up and flung against the far wall, where it shattered in a million pieces. Logan snapped at the ghost, "Knock it off!" Even though he couldn't see it, he had the sense that the ghost knew he was talking to him, knew he was there.

"It's stopped," Marc told him, acknowledging his guess. "It doesn't have a face that I can see, but I'd swear it's giving you the stink eye."

Logan had no idea why, but he looked out onto the street, and he saw shadows, evanescent and seemingly moving with a life of their own, and also saw people who were slightly transparent at the edges disappearing into buildings. He also saw a man in a paper hospital gown standing on the sidewalk across the way, looking around like he didn't recognize the city at all, a large gash sealed with thick black stitches bisecting his bald scalp. He could swear he saw a gleam of white bone beneath the stitches, but there was no blood oozing from the wound. Probably because he was clearly not breathing. Oh, he was walking around, looking deeply disoriented, but his chest wasn't rising and falling.

The rest of them had followed his gaze, and they all saw for themselves this weird tableau. Luckily, most of the living people on the street and driving past didn't seem to notice, but then again, this was L.A. - if you wanted to stand out, you had to do more than simply be undead.

"What the hell's going on?" Matt asked, sounding slightly alarmed. It was a damn good question.

Logan grabbed his cell phone and called Angel's office, figuring if anything supernatural was going on, they'd know. The phone was picked up by Bren on the second ring. "Kid, what the fuck's going on?" he asked.

"Oh shit! You were comin' into L.A. today, weren't you?" Actually, Logan came in last night, but he was enjoying the anonymity, and actually slept about eighteen hours straight in a shitbag motel room. He had no dreams he could remember, and felt lucky for that. "You're here now?"

"Yeah, in a diner near the private airstrip. We seem to have an influx of ghosts here."

"Yeah, that seems to be going on citywide," Bren told him, sounding a little stressed. He could hear him typing rapidly on his computer keyboard. "We're getting reports of dead people showing up everywhere. Giles is trying to figure out what's going on, but so far we have no fucking clue. Can you get here? Giles seems to think it's better if we're all in one place, in case this turns violent. 'Cause if it does, we're so totally fucked."

Of course they were. They weren't zombies, which at least had a physical form you could deal with. How did you kill something that didn't need a body to exist? If they decided to attack, how could they fight back? "We'll be right there," he told him, hanging up.

So much for a bit of peace and quiet.


	2. Chapter 2

2

They passed an awful lot of dead people on their way to the office. It was really creepy.

Also unnerving, as there were people walking about who, much like the guy in the paper gown with the sutures in his head, were obviously physically dead, yet up and about anyways. They weren't zombies, though - Logan didn't see them attack anyone. But then again, he remembered how it was down in Santo Marco, with the dead reanimated and held in check by those demi-gods, and he wondered if they'd found a way back to Earth. Why would they come to L.A.? Revenge against Bob? Didn't they know he was off on vacation?

When they got to the office, it seemed fairly full. Bren was behind his desk, talking to someone on the phone, and Kier was with him, checking out something on the computer. Naomi and Xander were sitting on the sofa, drinking coffee, and as soon as they came in, Xander carped, "Oh holy crap, it's Freddy Krueger."

"That bastard was a copycat," Marc replied. "Logan had the claws first."

Matt was introduced to everyone, and then Giles stuck his head out of Angel's office, looking a bit surprised. "Good, you're here," he said, barely acknowledging Matt in any respect. "Can you contact Bob?"

Logan had a feeling this was coming. "No. When he went off to do that favor for his ex-wife, he took his energy with him. Believe me, after Je - I've tried to contact him. Either he's too far away or he's cut off or something. I've been unable to get through."

"What's this about?" Matt whispered to Marc.

"You don't think something's happened to him, do you?" Naomi asked, alarmed. Still hung up on him, was she? Logan knew he shouldn't feel a sting of jealousy, but he still did.

It was Giles that shook his head. "Once you're an avatar, you're generally an avatar for life. Even if Bob was killed in another dimension, his energy would manifest in Logan."

"Oh," Naomi said, and looked uncertain. "That's good to know ... I guess."

How did she think he felt about it?

Angel wasn't here yet, but was on his way. Logan mentioned the problem he and Marc had encountered down in Santo Marco with animated dead people, and how Bob had essentially come along and fixed the problem - supposedly. Giles considered that a moment, and shook his head. "Even if they could escape again, if someone was stupid enough to break the super seals Bob put in place, they'd be physically bound to Santo Marco until they could take over enough people to escape their bounds. That would take a while. Also, I don't think they had anything to do with disembodied spirits."

"Could we be dealing with a death god who does?" Logan asked.

Giles grimaced, looking away briefly. He didn't want to say it. "It's a very good possibility. In fact, it could be little else, unless the barrier between this world and the dimension of the dead has ruptured."

Sid leaned against the wall beside the bookcase, taking on his usual posture of silent observation. As he liked to say, he was a man of action, not words. Logan sat down on the end of the couch with a sarcastic smirk. "Hell is full and the dead are walking the earth."

"Please, no Night of the Living Dead references now," Kier asked. "People are freaking out enough as it is."

"No, they're not," Marc pointed out. "In fact, why is that? There's all sorts of ghosts and animated corpses out there, and almost no one has noticed."

Giles did something he rarely did - he shrugged. "People often ignore what they can't understand or don't want to see. That's why most people exist in this world blissfully ignorant of the supernatural."

"You guys are serious, aren't you?" Matt asked, and he seemed genuinely stunned. "Holy shit."

"So what's your power, new boy?" Xander asked, giving him a harsh look. Maybe he didn't have any powers to speak of, but he'd been aware of the supernatural long enough to be impatient with the newbies.

Matt made a dismissive gesture and wandered towards the window, which was blocked off with heavy blinds. "I can control water."

"Water?" Xander repeated in disbelief, then snickered. "So you're Aquaman?"

"Hey," Naomi said, giving him a backhand smack on the arm. She was wearing gloves, so he didn't get shocked, but he recoiled slightly anyways. "Knock it off. I have power over electricity, and you never made fun of me."

"Yeah, but that's 'cause that shit's cool. Water is just ... well, that's lame."

Marc suddenly towered over him. "Are my powers lame?"

Xander seemed to understand now that he was treading on very dangerous ground. "Not at all; yours are really cool. I wish I could paralyze people by touching them. Especially in line at the ATM."

Marc gave him a warning scowl, then sat down on the couch beside him, really upping the discomfort ante.

Matt opened a blind slat and looked out at the street, and Kier cursed and jumped back into the shadows as Bren bolted to his feet and ripped Matt away from the window. "Don't do that!"

Matt looked stunned. "What? Why?"

"Because I'm a fucking vampire, you moron!" Kier snapped. He didn't appear burnt, but it was a very near thing - only his supernatural reflexes had saved him. "I can't be in direct sunlight!"

Matt stared at him for a long time. "Goddamn it, you're serious, aren't you?"

This was really not the time for a newbie. How were they supposed to break someone in with all this shit going on?

Matt looked around the room, and asked, "Are any of you vampires too?"

"Just Angel," Xander replied helpfully.

"I'm just a demon," Bren said, looking at his computer.

Matt stared extra hard at the back of his head. "Demon?"

"Hon, we've been over this," Marc said, a small edge of irritation in his voice.

"Yeah, but I had no idea that you were being serious."

Xander sighed dramatically and rolled his eyes. "The supernatural exists - get used to it. Can we move on now?"

"That would be lovely," Giles admitted, pulling a very old looking book off the shelves in the front office.

The door opened, and Angel paused, looking around the extremely full office. "Logan - I didn't realize you were back in town. Hey."

"Hey."

"Hi Marcus."

"Hey tall, dark, and toothsome. How's it hanging?"

"Upside down from the ceiling," Xander interjected, smiling at his own joke. Angel and Marc both gave him evil stares, and his smile wilted under the scrutiny. "What, don't you guys have a sense of humor?"

Angel's look took on a weary aspect as he shook his head dismissively, and he decided just to ignore Xander. Logan figured he did that a lot. "Any ideas, Giles?"

"Nothing concrete. But I've narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities." Giles shoved his glasses up on his forehead and rubbed his eyes. "We're dealing with a death god, a complete dimensional collapse, or a very powerful necromancer."

"Necrophiliac?" Xander repeated dubiously.

Giles shot him a harsh glare, like he'd malapropped on purpose. It was possible he had. "Necromancer."

Bren, who had sat back down at his desk after shooing Matt away, asked, "Isn't that just another term for a warlock?"

Giles grimaced, like the thought pained him. "People do sometimes use the terms interchangeably, but it's incorrect. A true necromancer doesn't really know any other spells - they specialize in conversing with and raising the dead, as well as conjuring souls from the ether."

"I see dead people," Xander said, in a strange voice. Naomi smacked him on the arm again, and Logan was only sorry she didn't punch him in the head.

"But that's black magic, isn't it?" Angel asked, looking troubled.

Giles shook his head slightly. "It can be. It depends on the necromancer."

Matt sat down on the other side of Marc, looking slightly lost, but Marc patted his knee, and that seemed to temporarily placate him. At least he kept his mouth shut.

Angel shrugged with his hands, letting them fall at his sides. "So we track down the necromancer. That should be simple."

"You'd think," Giles said, in a way that suggested he wasn't convinced.

It probably wasn't as easy as that - was it ever?

They discussed possible spells to track down the necromancer - if it was indeed a necromancer - when someone walked in through the door. Literally; they just walked through the closed door.

"Oh thank god," Wesley said. "The first time I walked into a dentist's office."

For a long moment, everyone just stared at the ghost Wesley, Angel especially. Wesley stared back, aware how awkward this was, but he also realized how many people there were in the room that he didn't know . He looked to be the exact same age as when he died, in a leather jacket, dark pants and an equally shirt, although Logan couldn't help but notice there was a hole in his shirt, darker at the edges with blood. "Giles," he finally said. "Xander. What is this, a Sunnydale reunion?"

"You've been brought back," Logan said. It was a stupidly obvious thing to say, but he only said it because someone had to say something.

Wesley half shrugged, dipping his head towards his shoulder. "Apparently. I can't tell you how odd this is."

"We're right there with you," Angel finally said, looking supremely pained and guilty. "So, um, how have you been?"

"Dead." Angel winced at the reply, and that must have come out harsher than he intended, because Wes quickly added, "Although that's more or less something you realize in retrospect. Some of them out there are aware they're not supposed to be here, though."

"Have you talked to them?" Giles asked curiously.

Wes nodded. "I was trying to figure out what was going on. What I discovered has left me more confused. Everybody who's reanimated has the wrong body."

Matt leaned over to Marc and whispered, "Is he really a dead guy?"

"What do you mean?" Giles asked Wes.

"I mean that I heard a reanimated woman complaining that she was Julio Ramirez, a seventeen year old Latino, not an elderly Asian woman, although his body was that of an aged Japanese female. I thought it might have been some sort of disorientation from sudden resurrection, but I talked to every reanimated corpse I came across, and everyone claimed to be in the wrong body: wrong gender, wrong race, wrong age, sometimes wrong location - I ran into a woman who claimed to be from Notting Hill. If she wasn't, she had studied the accent."

Giles and Wes shared the same worried look. Logan guessed that this was bad.

"How can that be?" Kier asked. He was back standing behind Bren. "What the fuck is going on here?"

Wes shot him a suspicious glance. "And you are?"

"Kier, Bren's boyfriend. I'm a vampire, but a good one. Kinda. You're Wesley, right? The ex-Watcher who got … umm, yeah, gonna shut up here. Nice to meet you."

Wesley raised an eyebrow at him - it was probably the vampire comment - but he thanked him all the same.

"People who touched the supernatural in some way might be the easiest for a necromancer to access," Giles pointed out.

"Touched?" Marc replied. "You mean as in killed by?" He shot a glance at Wes. "No offense."

"None taken. And while killed by the supernatural would definitely fall in the touched category, it's only part of it. Touched would mean anyone who's had a brush with the supernatural, whether they were aware of it or not, and didn't have a soul beholden to or claimed by any god or demon."

"Absolutely any contact with the supernatural?" Bren repeated. "Holy shit, it's gonna look like Times Square on New Year's Eve out there."

Angel nodded in grim agreement. "That's why we need to work fast. Giles, that locator spell."

He nodded, and gave Wes a hesitant glance. "Would you like to help?"

"It's why I'm here," the dead man replied sincerely.

The two ex-Watchers went back into the inner offices, Wesley following Giles but walking through the wall anyways, and Angel looked like he wanted to follow, but didn't. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against Bren's desk, staring at the floor.

"Awkward much?" Xander said.

"Does this mean everyone we know who's been killed is coming back?" Logan wondered, addressing the question at Angel. Meaning of course Cordelia and Gunn specifically, but possibly some of the baddies they'd put down as well.

Angel met his eyes, and seemed to understand what he was asking. "Doyle and Cordy were both beholden to the Powers That Be, so we won't see them. Although Lila came back and she's beholden to the Senior Partners, so maybe it's possible."

"Lila?" Logan repeated. "The uber-bitch?"

"Yeah. She's back at my apartment." At his odd look, he elaborated. "She's afraid the Senior Partners will be mad at her for manifesting even though they didn't arrange it. She's hiding out."

"How do we know they didn't arrange it?" Logan countered. The question hung in the air, and they all exchanged quizzical glances. It was a possibility to add to the pile.

After Angel explained to everyone who Lila was, since some of the people here didn't know, Wes walked through the closed office door, making Xander jump. "Would you stop doing that?" he snapped.

Wes just gave him a sidelong glance, suggesting he thought about saying something sarcastic and cutting, but decided against it. "The locator spell isn't working," he reported. "It just indicates the entire city of Los Angeles."

"Which means what exactly?" Logan asked first.

Wes shrugged, grimacing at having no concrete answers. "It means we're being blocked, or there's no person to find who's doing this."

Xander scoffed. "Well somebody's obviously doing it. I've never heard of a natural dead people clog."

Wes shot him a harsh look. "Somebody's doing it, yes, but maybe not a person."

"A demon?" Naomi guessed.

"A god," Logan groaned, rubbing his eyes. Oh, he so didn't want to have to deal with another god again.

"What we have to figure out is why someone would do this; it'll be easier to track down the perpetrator then," Marc said, trying out some investigative logic. "Why would someone do this? What does this cause? What's the gain?"

Angel was the first to take a stab at an answer. "Chaos. It causes chaos, and frees up a lot of dead people to walk the Earth. But I'm not sure there's anything to gain besides mass confusion."

"Perhaps when the second phase kicks in," Wes said, looking thoughtful and troubled.

Angel finally looked at Wes full on, which was something he'd been nervously avoiding since he'd come in. His eyes lingered over the bloody hole in his shirt, but eventually scudded up to his face. "What do you mean the second phase?"

Wes looked reluctant to tell them all, but he did. "So far all the animated corpses I've encountered or seen are the freshly dead, those in good shape. What happens when whoever's doing this starts resurrecting more decayed corpses?"

"Oh yuck," Bren commented.

"It'll be zombie stomping time, is that what you're saying?" Xander replied. "'Cause I'm down for that. Hell, I'll go home and get my chainsaw now."

Wes scowled at him. "Hardly. How do you think you'd feel if you suddenly found yourself alive again, not only in the wrong body, but in a body where bits of it are falling off?"

"Double yuck," Bren said, shuddering.

"Again, I'm thinking it's zombie time," Xander commented.

Angel frowned at him this time. "They'll be traumatized, to say the least."

Wes nodded. "And probably angry. But what that will ultimately add up to beyond emotionally traumatizing a large number of dead people, I'm not sure." He scratched his head - a weird thing for a ghost to do - and asked, "Where the hell is Bob? We could use him right now."

"He's off helping his ex-wife with something in another dimension," Logan told him. "I can't seem to get a hold of him."

"Really? How rude of him. You'd think he'd leave his avatar a phone number or something."

"Tell me about it," Logan agreed. "But I'm not totally out of options. He might not be talkin' to me, but I find it hard to believe he's totally icing Helga out." He dug out his cell phone, and since he had the Way Station on speed dial, he just hit a button and waited for the call to go through. It rang three times before someone answered with a clipped, "What the fuck do you want?"

From that wonderfully warm and profane greeting, he knew it was Lia. "I need to talk to -" He didn't even get that far - he heard a clunk, and then the drone of a dial tone. Why couldn't it have been Lau's shift today?

Angel gave him a tight, queasy smile. "It was Lia, wasn't it?"

"Yeah. She's a fucking ray of sunshine, isn't she?" Logan dropped the phone back in his coat pocket, and headed towards the door. "I'll just go pay a visit. It ain't far from here, and I can bring Helga back. It's a bit of a sausage fest in here anyways." That made Naomi laugh at least.

"I can come with you, bud," Marc said.

Matt grabbed Marc's shoulder, and looked stricken by the thought. "Oh please no."

Logan shook his head. "It's okay. I won't be long, and I can handle myself if things turn ugly."

Marc looked uncertain about that, but then Wes stepped forward and said, "I'll come with you. I wanted to have another look around anyways, see if there was something I missed."

He didn't know why, but Logan had a sense that Wesley wanted to talk to him about something, and going with him was the only way to do it in private. Logan shrugged, and grabbed the doorknob. "Sure, yeah. C'mon. We'll be back in a few minutes." Before there were any more protests, volunteers, or questions, he left, and just assumed Wes was following him.

He was right, just as he was right about Wes wanting to talk to him. He wanted to know what had been going on since he died, and how long ago that had been (he had no idea; apparently once you were dead, time ceased to exist, which made sense). Logan tried to be as succinct as possible since there was a lot to talk about, and it took up most of the walk to the Way Station. But in direct sunlight, all the ghosts looked more translucent, Wesley included, and it was a little freaky. It was equally freaky that so many other people on the street didn't seem to notice the ghost army surrounding them. In fact, some asshole talking on his cell phone walked right through Wes without stopping. "Watch where yer goin', fuckhead!" Logan shouted after him, but the guy didn't even turn around. Was it really people's personal denial keeping them from seeing all of this, or just complete selfishness?

Wes took all the news he gave him very well, but Wes had that whole British reserve thing going for him, which he assumed was something all Watchers were taught, because he knew British people who were no more reserved than anybody else (Srina, Spider, Ruby, Rags, all of Bob's British descendants).

The block where the Way Station was situated was strangely crowded, but mostly by the dead. Nobody appeared to be headed for the bar, they were just wandering around in a disoriented daze. Although they were mostly ghosts, an animated dead person came right up to him, making him stop short. He was a compact Hispanic man, average height, but his barrel chest and broad shouldered build made him look a bit stockier than he actually was, wearing jeans, a denim jacket, and a worn t-shirt advertising a strip club called Kinky's. You had to look closely to see the bloodstains, which were like little rust colored spots down the front, although his bristling black hair was cut short enough that you could see the scar that left a trail running from his temple to behind his ear. He stared at Logan intently, his hazel eyes smoldering with some kind of free floating anger, and he said, "Tell me it was Camaxtli."

Logan stared back at him in disbelief. "What?"

The man grabbed the lapels of his jacket, pulling him closer. "Damn it, Logan, tell me! It was Camaxtli, wasn't it? It wasn't her. There's no way it could have been her."

He grabbed the man's hands and ripped them away, but as he did, the words really sunk in. What he was saying didn't make sense … for a stranger. But they did make sense for someone who was dead, someone who may not have died in this country, but who had definitely been touched by the supernatural in life. For someone who knew his name, and felt no compunction about reaching out and grabbing him. Logan's gut clenched and his stomach turned to stone. Oh shit, he was so afraid this was going to happen.

He searched the stranger's face for something familiar, but only saw it in the eyes, the strange eyes that seemed to know him anyways. "Scott?" he asked, already knowing the answer.


	3. Chapter 3

3

Out of the corner of his eye, Logan saw Wes look sharply at the man, his eyes suddenly bright and curious. "Scott? Really?"

The man didn't look at Wesley; he never looked away from Logan's eyes, which he scrutinized with a laser like intensity. "Tell me. Did Bob get rid of him? What happened to Jean?"

Oh god. Logan shook his head, wondering what he was going to tell him … and wondering anew if Camaxtli did have anything to do with what happened to Jean. Everything Xavier told him about Jean having a split personality that Xavier himself made to protect Jean from her own darker impulses never quite made sense to him. First of all, he had no idea Xavier was such a manipulative bastard, and secondly that he thought he would just accept Jean's mental rearrangement. Him - the guy's whose brain had been so fucked over time and again by telepaths that not only did he have Swiss cheese memories, but he sometimes doubted he had a genuine personality, just a random collection of bits he never quite lost from all those other implanted personalities. Yeah, he'd totally understand him rearranging Jean's mind for her "own good". _Absolutely._

The third funny thing about it all was Jean's "second personality" wasn't a personality at all - she just alternated between pointlessly furious and almost catatonically bored. It was like there was some kind of neuronal misfiring, a disconnect between power and intention. He knew from experience that when you got god power, especially when you didn't expect it, you could have a hard time channeling it. It was overwhelming, mainly because it was something that no mortal being was ever meant to handle.

But ... the last time Camaxtli was around, the Powers That Be supposedly took him out. And Jean and Camaxtli had a long time getting used to each other, so they worked together quite well - Jean and Cammy had been tight. Then again, to totally remove Cammy's power from his avatar - Jean - Bob assumed that the PTB's would kill Jean. Not out of malice or even punishment, but because separating the two was nearly impossible. Still, Jean showed up alive ... but changed. Could they have accidentally done that to her, trying to save her from Camaxtli but destroying her in the process? Or had some of Cammy's tainted power lain dormant in Jean and escaped the notice of the PTB's, coming back furious in Jean, but damaged in a fundamental way?

He just didn't know. He suspected, mainly because what Xavier said and what Jean did made no sense at all. She had been acting more like Cammy with amnesia than any form of herself. And Logan felt he should know since he'd had the misfortune to come face to face with Cammy in the past. He was also fairly certain that even though he thought it was Jean, it was actually Cammy he slept with in the mindscape that time. Didn't really make him feel good about himself, but what were people but playthings for the gods?

Finally, Logan told Scott, "Jean's dead."

He blinked, took a step back, but wasn't really all that shocked. What did he think would happen if she was controlled by Cammy? "Are you sure? How?"

Now here was the really bad part. "I killed her."

Scott punched him in the face. He just hauled off and hit him with one of this guy's small but meaty fists. Logan let him do it, because he felt like he deserved it. Wes gasped, and exclaimed, "What the hell are you doing?"

Scott reeled back, grabbing his fist, and yelled, "Fuck!" He shook his hand several times, moving the fingers as if trying to determine if any were broken or not.

Logan straightened, working the kinks out of his neck, and carped, "I thought I told you never to hit bone."

"I think I just glanced off one," Scott replied, his voice pained.

Wes looked between them in disbelief. "Is this normal for you two, taking shots at each other?"

Logan shrugged. "Pretty much."

Scott composed himself, apparently determining that nothing was broken, although tears still welled in his now deep brown eyes. "How the hell could you kill her, Logan? I thought you ... she was your friend, damn it! When I wanted to give up on you she never did!"

"If she was still harboring Camaxtli, he did what he was designed to do," Wes said, his voice slightly chilly.

Both he and Scott looked at Wes with varying degrees of surprise. "What?" Logan asked first.

"I know it looked like an accident," Wes told him, not without pity. "But do you really think Bob ever does anything accidentally? He made you his avatar for a reason. You were his perfect agent to take out Camaxtli's avatar if and when the time came. With Bob's power and your healing factor, Camaxtli couldn't stop you. He couldn't burn you enough to make you go away, and some part of Jean would probably hold him back in any case. Weapon X programmed you to be an assassin, Logan, a perfect killing machine, and although you broke your programming, you still have that in you. Don't you assess every new threat with "How can I best kill this"? I bet you do it unconsciously, it's been so engrained in you. And Bob knew that. He used that to his best advantage. He might be one of the good guys - in a technical sense if not a literal one - but to gods we are just temporary placeholders, mortal creatures that disappear in a blink of their lifespan. You were his best chance, and he took it. Maybe that's why you can't get a hold of him, Logan - he doesn't want to face your wrath."

For a long time he and Scott just stared at Wes, transparent at the edges but otherwise unflappable, and his words cut. Logan heard him, didn't want to believe him ... and yet, he knew already, didn't he? Camaxtli had all but warned him that eventually it would come down to him and Jean, one of them killing the other. Jean blinked; Logan didn't. And the reason he didn't blink was because, love or not, of the pair of them, he was the more genuinely ruthless of the two. Jean channeled the more dangerous god, but Bob had found the more dangerous Human. Bob won.

"Son of a bitch," Logan cursed, feeling bile rise in his throat. The bastard - the motherfucking bastard! No wonder he was hiding in a nether-dimension. He probably knew this was going to happen, and he let it.

"I never trusted that bastard," Scott pointed out. "I always knew he was evil."

"He's not evil," Wes replied, surprisingly. "He's a god. Their concept of morality is quite different from ours."

"You're a god apologist now?" Logan asked him coldly.

Wes let out a breathless, sarcastic little laugh. "Hardly. I'm not excusing what he's done. It's just, to him, this was the lesser of two evils."

"Usin' me to kill a friend was a lesser evil?"

Wes shrugged. "Lesser than the destruction of the entire Human race, yes."

Okay, put that way, it suddenly didn't sound that bad.

No, no, Bob was not getting off the hook for this. If even half of what Wes said was true, then ... well, he didn't know what he was going to do. What could he do to Bob? Something. Bob had enemies, some very powerful ones. Maybe he could cut a deal.

What was he thinking? You couldn't cut a deal with any god - you couldn't trust those fuckers any farther than you could chuck their corporeal forms. What he needed to do was somehow get Bob exorcised from him for good.

"Is this Camaxtli's revenge?" Scott asked, gesturing to himself, and all the dead around them.

Logan shared a curious glance with Wes. Hadn't Camaxtli been a death god, amongst other things? And according to what Bob had said in the past, death gods technically couldn't die - not permanently, at any rate. Still, you'd think if the Powers That Be took him out, this would be over.

But it wasn't the first time.

"I think it would more likely be a friend of Camaxtli's than Camaxtli him or herself," Wes finally replied, correctly busting up the gender terms - gods technically didn't have a gender. "But it's worth investigating. Camaxtli's chosen forms of revenge usually involve famine and fire."

"Oh cute. Well, this is the fire season, isn't it?"

Scott snorted disdainfully. "It's Southern California. Isn't it always the fire season?"

Good point. Logan rubbed his eyes wearily, and asked Wes, "What kind of friends did Camaxtli have, exactly? I thought everyone was scared of him. Or her, whatever."

Wes nodded. "He/she was not a popular, benevolent god, even amongst god-kind, so yes, there wasn't a huge fan club. But there were a few who decided it was better to have the evil bastard on their side rather than against them."

"So he was the Magneto of gods?" Scott asked sarcastically.

Wes gave him a blank look. "Magneto?"

"The evil mutant guy I mentioned earlier," Logan reminded him.

"Oh, right. It's easier for me to keep track of demons and gods than mutants. My training, I suppose."

Logan wanted to say that they also made a bit more sense - in a bizarre, chaotic sort of way - but that was besides the point, so he didn't mention it. They brought Scott up to speed on what they were doing, trying to get to the bottom of all of this and headed for The Way Station.

He had yet to tell Scott that Xavier was also dead. He wondered if they'd run into him before he could break it to him, and hoped not, because he wondered if he'd kill Xavier again himself. But if this was all Camaxtli's doing, it wasn't Xavier's fault, so he couldn't be mad at him. Well, _that_ mad at him. God, this was confusing.

Logan led the way inside the bar, the silence and abandoned peace of the outer glamour giving way to the overwhelming smell of booze, sweat, and demons, and the noise of The Hold Steady's "Cattle and The Creeping Things" blasting from the jukebox. He wondered if the jukebox had lost its empathic abilities, but then the song came to the line _" - half of them were visions -", _and he figured the thing was just being coy. The place was dark and surprisingly crowded, but there was an electric current of anxiety running through the room - the demon community really didn't like this development. As they entered, a reptilian type of demon who was a sunburned shade of pink started waving his big paws and shouted, "No screwed up dead, no ghosts, no Humans! Get the fuck out -"

Logan held up his fist and popped his claws. The demon, who was approaching them, stopped in his tracks. " Welcome to the bar," he said, and spun on his heels and quickly disappeared into the crowd.

"There's no such thing as a quiet entrance with you, is there?" Scott commented, although it had a slightly sardonic edge to it.

They made their way towards the bar, the crowd parting for them (although Wesley went ahead and walked through any demon that wouldn't move aside for him), but before they reached it, a familiar female voice exclaimed, "I was wondering when the hell you were showing up!"

Helga cut through the crowd much easier than they had, mainly because she ran the bar and owned a flamethrower (she wasn't currently carrying it, but everyone knew about it), and the shotgun beneath the bar had her name on it. She looked good, although she'd had her naturally green hair cut into a sleek bob, and along with her jeans she wore a t-shirt for the band Ghostland Observatory, suggesting she was finding some Bob like humor in all of this. She seemed only mildly surprised to see the ghost Wesley. "So you didn't get a body, huh?"

"Apparently not. I'm not sure what the determining factor on that was."

She looked at Logan, and asked, "Who's your friend?"

"He's not my friend, he's Scott." Did that come out right? Oh, the hell with it.

She looked at him in obvious surprise. "Really? You in there, tight ass?"

"Don't call me tight ass!"

"Yeah, that's him," she said, nodding. Scott wasn't amused, but Logan caught Wesley smirking before he quickly looked away. "So how the hell did you get here? Weren't you killed in Canada?"

"That's partly why we came here," Wesley interjected, taking over the conversation. "There's even more inexplicable things going on here than simply the resurrecting of the dead. We were hoping you might be able to help us."

Helga cocked her head curiously and put a hand on her hip. "How? I have no fuckin' clue what's going on out there."

"We were hoping you could contact Bob for us," Wesley told her.

That made her chuckle darkly. "No can do. He's been incommunicado for a while. Occasionally I get postcards from him, letting me know he's okay, just embroiled in some complicated god drama."

Wesley looked at her askance. "Postcards?"

"Seriously. They just materialize at random times, and have weird pictures on the front. I got a "Greetings From Atlantis" one last time."

"What kind of god drama is he dealing with?" Wes wondered. "Could it have bled into this dimension?"

She considered that for a very long moment, eyes focused on nothing in particular. "Huh. I wonder. Come on, let's see what he talked about that I skimmed." With that she turned on her heels, and stalked towards the back offices. They followed her, as the invitation was implicit, and the crowd was far more accommodating to them now that they knew they were with her. They went into Bob's office, and Logan closed the door on M83 singing about a ghost screaming your name.

The quiet was sudden and strange, but otherwise pleasant. The place was just the same as it had always been, a dusty room with lots of exposed wood, one used more for storage than anything else. Cases of beer sat against the side walls, vying for space with cases marked with biohazard symbols and rather dubious legends, such as _"Contents: Two hundred hand grenades". _Helga opened the top drawer of the old wooden desk that Bob used for his own, and after a moment's rummaging pulled out a stack of postcards held together by a rubber band. There were maybe two dozen in all. "Let's get sifting," she said, pulling off the rubber band and tossing the stack in the middle of the desk. "Ignore the mushy stuff."

It was discovered that Wes could manipulate objects if he concentrated, and as long as they were as meager as a postcard. And the postcards were odd, portraying mythical kingdoms and occasionally Bob in loud surfer shorts (or, in one disturbing case, a florescent orange Speedo) showing off the place like a model, hands held like he was presenting the place as a prize. He appeared to be growing his hair out again.

Logan wondered if he or Jean would be mentioned, but they never were. Was he avoiding the topic? Logan wasn't sure if he should be angry or just fucking disappointed. Wasn't this typical somehow?

"Here's something," Wes said, holding up a card that read _"I caught Humans in the Crab Kingdom". _"He says that Dysnomia picked a fine time to reappear and be a pain in the ass."

"Dysnomia?" Scott asked.

"She's the goddess of willful lawlessness, supposedly Eris's daughter, but you have to take all myths with a grain of salt."

"Eris's daughter?" Logan repeated, scowling. "Fuck, Eris is bad news. Bob seemed to indicate she was the strongest of the non-collective gods. However that works."

Wes nodded in agreement. "That's what I've picked up. Hard to believe, too, since she's considered so minor in the pantheon, but once again, Humans get it wrong. I suppose it goes back to the really powerful beings don't brag about how powerful they are."

"But lawlessness doesn't translate to ghosts and dead people," Scott interjected.

Wes grimaced ruefully. "No, it doesn't."

Logan tossed the postcards he had back down on the desk. "So this is a waste of time?"

"Not necessarily," Wes immediately replied. "Eris is the goddess of discord. This is certainly discordant."

"But if she's doing this, we're fucked," Helga said. "No one can go against her."

"She isn't a death goddess, though, is she?" Logan asked Wes. "You'd think that would play some part in this."

"Well … a being as powerful as her doesn't necessarily have to play by the same rules as everyone else."

"Or she could have help," Helga suggested. "As prickly as she is, she has allies more than friends, but if she says frog they'll sure as hell jump."

"Do you know who her allies are?" Wes asked her curiously.

She rubbed the back of her neck as she thought, frowning at the list unspooling in her own head. "I'm no expert, but maybe I can contact someone who is."

"Who?" Scott asked.

"Moros," she replied. "Might need your help, Wes, if you think you can handle physical objects."

Wes seemed stunned by the mention of the terminally depressed god of doom, but after a moment he nodded. "I can try."

Logan eyed her dubiously. "Doesn't Bob usually have to contact him? I didn't think he got up to answer direct summons anymore."

"Usually no, but he knows me now, since I've worked under his aegis enough. He's afraid if he doesn't answer I might hurt him."

Wes gave her a look that suggested he thought she was kidding - or hoped she was - while Logan just nodded. "He knows you remarkably well."

"I think Bob may have talked me up a bit," she admitted, rubbing the back of her neck like she was tired. "A little too much, actually. But if it gets him to pick up the goddamn phone, I don't care."

"So where does this leave us?" Scott asked, sounding frustrated, his rigid posture and the fact that he seemed to have no idea what to do with his hands giving away his anxiety. Logan noticed that the guy whose body Scott was inhabiting had a pair of flaming dice tattooed on the inside of his left wrist. Had Scott noticed that yet? And since it was such an odd place for a tattoo, he wondered if this corpse had tattoos all up and down his arms. Scott returned as the Tattooed Man? That was fucking hilarious. "Hoping this god responds to us and has the answers we want?"

Helga arched a perfectly green eyebrow at him. "Yeah, basically. You got a better idea?"

Scott threw out his hands, opened his mouth to say something, and closed it. Then he tried to speak again, and got it right this time. "What if Jean comes back? What if she's back already?"

"What, you afraid she's gonna go bugfuck again?" She replied, somewhat callously. "She won't come back with her powers, unless she comes back in a mutant corpse, and then she'd have their powers. But I don't know if it works like that."

"But what if she still has some of Camaxtli's energy in her?" Scott argued. His face was flushing dark with blood, and Logan wasn't sure if he was angry or sorrowful or a combination of the two.

They hadn't discussed the Camaxtli theory with her, so she looked a bit surprised … and yet, not nearly as surprised as Logan would have thought. Did she suspect? "Then we're fucked, honey. Let's just hope the cheese fell off her cracker, shall we?"

Helga's natural brusqueness was clearly hitting all the wrong buttons in Scott, who was on the verge of an emotional meltdown anyways, and Logan could tell he was going to lose it. So he quickly interjected, "We're overlooking the most obvious solution, y'know."

They all looked at him in varying degrees of disbelief. "Oh really?" Wes asked, with just a hint of lacerating British sarcasm. (They could use it like a weapon, like no other people on the planet.) "And what is that?"

"I'm Bob's avatar, right? So all I need to do is get his attention."

Helga gave him a warning glance. She probably guessed where he was going, and didn't like it. "You don't mean -"

"Yeah darlin'," he interrupted. "I do. Kill me."


	4. Chapter 4

Helga scowled at him, Wes looked gobsmacked, and Scott said simply, "Somebody get me a gun."

Helga shifted her evil look to Scott. "It's a bad idea, Scooter."

"Don't call me Scooter!"

"Why is it a bad idea?" Logan asked her.

"Because we don't know what will happen when you die. You could get caught up in the spell or whatever is causing this, even if you just die for a couple of seconds, and you could end up a ghost or a jockey in someone else's body."

Logan grimaced sheepishly, feeling like a moron. "I hadn't thought of that."

Helga's eyes narrowed, sending a loud yet still tacit _"I told you so". _"No, you hadn't."

"But I'm still Bob's avatar. He wouldn't leave me like that."

"Yeah, but how long 'til he gets back? I wouldn't take that chance. Do you really wanna?"

Put that way, it didn't sound like a great idea. Scott crossed his arms over his chest, and said, "It might be our only chance."

"It's not," she insisted. "Not yet. C'mon Wes, you want to contact the universe's most depressed god?"

Wes looked around, as if it was a serious question. "I don't seem have anything better to do."

"That's what I like to hear - enthusiasm," she replied sarcastically. She gestured for the door, and she and Wes left the room, the door opening to let in a brief, chaotic blast of a Mr. Bungle song that he recognized mainly thanks to Bob (Bob was a big fan). "Goodbye Sober Day". Cute - now the jukebox was being direct.

Scott scowled at the noise before the door closed once more, then trained the scowl on him. "So what the hell are we supposed to do, just wait here?"

"Yeah, I think that's the gist of it."

He threw his hands up in frustration, and then paced over to the crates that claimed to be a mixture of beer, grenades, and nuclear waste. "I've had all morning to wait. I'm tired of it."

"Tough titties, Scott. You're supposed to be the strategist, right? How do you fight an enemy when you don't even know who they are?"

He glared at him, but didn't say anything. What could he say? They both knew he was right. Finally he propped his butt on the edge of Bob's desk, and said, "Fine. I guess you can go into detail about everything's that's happened since I died."

Oh great. Maybe he should have went off with Hel and Wes, because this was going to be painful.

4

There was a local wizard's guild? Angel felt stupid for not having known that. How long had he been in Los Angeles, and it never occurred to him that there'd be one here? Now he felt like an idiot.

Giles called them to see if there were any known necromancers in the area. They figured Logan was covering the god angle for the moment, so they might as well stick to the more earthly supernatural explanation.

Apparently the wizard's guild didn't like necromancers very much, although they tried to keep track of them when they could. It seemed Wolfram and Hart had the most in the area (why was he not surprised?), but there was one who was "semi-retired" and not on Wolfram and Hart's payroll - a woman who went by the unlikely name of "Ana Dyne", and lived near the West Hollywood border. As soon as he and Giles announced their plan to go talk to her, Bren gasped, "Ana Dyne's a necromancer? Cool! She never mentioned that to me!"

Bren knew her casually, as it seemed her "day job" was as a hot DJ on the West Hollywood party scene. Last week she'd DJ'd a set at a new nightclub called Threshold, and Kier and Bren had both gone. The name Threshold seemed really coincidental or unfortunate, depending on how things turned out, and he and Giles exchanged a suspicious look. Kier reported that there had been almost no demons at the club while they were there, and certainly no dead people or evidence of supernatural ritual, and Kier would know. Angel was still torn about Kier hanging around, and him being "special" was little in the way of help for the situation, but he supposed he had to grudgingly trust him a bit now. He wasn't convinced that Kier wouldn't eventually turn on the rest of them, but he'd never turn on Bren, so maybe that was something. It had to be for now.

It was decided that Bren would go with them since he knew her - sort of - but it was decided that this trek would involve just the three of them. Sid, Marc, and Kier wanted to go too, but it was decided that safety was still in numbers, and still back here, in case the dead turned disruptive or things got worse. (It was hard to imagine how things could get worse, but Angel wasn't about to assume the worst was over - in his long experience, it never was.) No one was happy about it, but they lived with it.

They had to take the sewers, because it was still daylight, but neither Giles nor Bren complained. Sure, the smell wasn't great, but they weren't running into ghosts or the animated dead down here. Apparently even dead people, given the choice, didn't stay in the sewers.

They came up to street level inside the storage room of a halfway house, which was so bizarre even Giles took a moment to digest how the hell a manhole cover ended up inside this building, even if it was as sad a building as this one. Bren speculated it was an old one covered over that was uncovered by vampires and demons for easy traffic, and Angel figured that was the most likely explanation.

He had to move very carefully, sticking to the shadows, but he made it unscathed to the run down apartment complex where Ana Dyne apparently lived. The interior hallway was mercifully dark and dingy (there were small, narrow windows in the corridors, but none had been cleaned for what seemed like years, and the L.A. smog blanket had rendered the glass opaque), but Bren had to bang on the door twice before finally there was movement inside and a voice in the apartment beyond cursed.

The door finally swung open on a tired but cranky litany. "You know I was up 'til five in the fucking morning, right? I had a rave last night and -" Ana finally opened her eyes all the way, and stared at Bren, and then looked at him and Giles with equal amounts of suspicion. "What the fuck is this?"

Ana was quite the sight. She appeared to be a Latina woman, petite but curvaceous, with her hair dyed a rainbow of different colors and secured in tight, unruly dreadlocks that made it look like she didn't have hair so much as tentacles in various states of decay. Her brown eyes were so bloodshot they looked nearly as crimson as Bren's eyes, and her lips were pale, dry and cracked from dehydration. She wore a ripped Chemical Brothers t-shirt and black panties, and nothing more beyond a silver stud in her nose and bottom lip.

"Umm, hi, remember me?" Bren asked sheepishly.

"Yeah, kid, you're the one with the cool red contacts and the pretty boyfriend. Who's the geezer parade with you?"

"Hey," Angel replied, hurt. He wasn't a "geezer". Well, okay, he was, but he hated to think of himself that way.

"We have to talk to you about, um, necromancy."

She just stared at him for a moment, then rubbed her eyes with her fist before turning away. "It's too early for this shit." She left the door open as she stalked away, an implicit invitation inside. But as Bren and Giles went inside, it wasn't enough for Angel.

"Uh, you have to invite my friend inside," Bren told her.

He could see Ana in what passed for her kitchenette. Her apartment wasn't big; it was essentially a loft, with the bedroom/living room/kitchen all combined, and the only separate room being the bathroom. She had her head stuck in her avocado colored refrigerator, but looked over it as Bren said that. "What the fuck is he, a vampire?"

"Um, yeah. But he's a good vampire. He won't hurt you -"

"Of course he won't hurt me," she snapped dismissively. "He's dead, and I control the dead. Come on in, Slappy."

Angel was able to step inside, even though he frowned at the nickname. "My name's not Slappy, it's Angel."

"Is it really? Funny, you don't look Mexican." She came out of the fridge with a can of Red Bull, which she cracked open and took a good, long swallow of before studying the three of them. She pointed at Giles, and said, "And what are you? Belial demon?"

He arched an eyebrow at her. "My eyes are hardly blue enough, are they? I'm Human. My name is Rupert Giles."

"Wow," she replied, grimacing humorously at his name. "Sorry dude."

Ana's apartment was also a sight to behold. Her futon was still folded out into a bed, the covers a tangled mess, her blinds shut tight against the sun, but there was enough light to see that she had clothes scattered all over her apartment. In fact, the only neatly stacked items were a milk crate full of vinyl albums and a shelf full of CDs. It was like a bachelor pad, only the clothes included bras and skirts.

"You fire the maid?" Giles asked coolly.

"You applying for the job, Benny Hill?"

That made Giles scowl at her evilly. _"Benny Hill?!"_

"Look," Angel said, before this could get really nasty. "Are you responsible for what's going on outside?"

She came out of the fridge eating a slice of cold pizza. "What's goin' on outside?"

Giles threw up his hands in frustration and Bren rubbed his eyes and sighed before telling her, "The dead are overrunning the city."

"They usually are," she replied, with a mouthful of crust. Then, after a moment, she added, "Wait, do you mean "dead" dead? As in zombies and shit?"

"More like ghosts and corpses animated with the souls of others," Angel replied. "So far they haven't been hostile, but the numbers are staggering. If they do get angry, we're all in trouble."

"Move aside, dead boy," she ordered, and crossed the room to her window. She peeked out the blinds, and after a long moment, commented, "Well hell, would you look at that? Weirdness."

"So you're claiming you had nothing to do with this?" Angel asked, watching her carefully. If she was lying, he'd know.

She snorted a type of disbelieved grunt, and turned away from the blinds. "Fuck no! I ain't never called up that many creepy crawlies at once, and certainly never any ghosts. How do you call up a ghost? Is that even possible?"

"It is," Giles said, his voice still hard and cold. He hadn't forgiven her for that Benny Hill comment. He couldn't blame him really. Couldn't she have referenced Monty Python or something? "But you need to know what you're doing."

"Well, that ain't me," she admitted, searching the floor for some clothes. She found some camouflaged pattern skating shorts and pulled them on. They barely fit her, and Angel was sure they were men short's that somehow just ended up in the pile. "I haven't even done any 'mancing in a year or so. It wasn't a big thing with me."

Giles look was molten, while his expression was stony. He not only didn't like her, but he was clearly suppressing the urge to shake her until her head fell off. "Not a big thing? Raising the dead isn't a big thing?"

She made an odd noise, kind of like a Valley girl would make at the mall when he friend said something stupid. "Of course it is, dude! Man, everybody would be doin' it if it was easy. It's just that I never really thought of it as a big thing - I went through a Goth phase as a teen, ya know. Didn't everybody?"

Giles glared at her, Angel didn't deign to respond, but Bren answered her. "Uh, no. I spent a couple years eating out of dumpsters - I didn't really have time to be Goth."

She shrugged indifferently. "You missed out."

This was getting nowhere. Angel asked, "Do you know of anyone who could have done this?"

"Someone powerful enough to call up an army of dead people? No. Unless Sam Raimi actually figured out how to do it so he didn't have to pay extras for his films."

Angel knew who Sam Raimi was, but he really didn't understand the reference. He scrubbed a hand through his hair, and exchanged a look with Giles, who seemed to be thinking the same thing he was: this was a waste of time. "Look -" he began, but stopped. Ana's apartment didn't smell great - dirty dishes, dirty laundry, she hadn't dusted since she moved in - but it didn't smell of dead flesh.

And now it did.

He looked towards her apartment door, listening hard, focusing on the sounds beyond. There were few, just the soft thud of footsteps - many footsteps. "Guys, I think we've got trouble," he said, just before the door burst off its hinges.

There were maybe a dozen reanimated dead in the hallway, filtering into Ana's apartment, but they weren't regular dead. For one thing, their eyes had rolled up until nothing but white showed, and something black was dribbling from the corners of some of their mouths. It smelled like a combination of old blood, bile, and pus. "Hey, George Romero lives in the Hollywood Hills!" Ana shouted at the group. "Get out!" She then said something that didn't sound like words at all, and yet Angel felt them somewhere deep in the center of his chest, where they burned like acid reflux. Even though that hadn't been aimed at him, he instantly felt the urge to get away, and realized that Ana really could have commanded him to some degree. He felt he could've resisted her, though, no matter how much it hurt.

Sadly, he wasn't the only one. The dead kept on coming, as if she'd done nothing but thrown water at them. She knew it, as she suddenly yelled, "Hey! I told you fuckers to get out! You can't ignore me!"

Giles shouted a spell and held his hand out towards the undead, and they seemed to hit an invisible wall that made them freeze in place, if only for a moment. "I can't hold it for long," he said, sweat already beading on his brow.

"Is there a back way out?" Angel asked Ana.

She stared at him in disbelief. "It's a fucking loft, Lost Boy! Of course not!"

Not that it mattered much - he couldn't have gone out that way anyways. It was too damn sunny out. Angel glanced at Bren, caught his eye. "Okay, we fight our way through. Take the legs out from under them - they'll survive, but they won't be mobile."

Bren sighed, and pulled a small metal cylinder out of the back of his jeans. "One of these days, we're gonna enter a room and not have to fight our way out of it." He flicked the cylinder and it telescoped out to a long baton that ended with a whip thin tip. It looked fragile, but Angel knew that its appearance was deceiving. Bren also unleashed his stronger demon form, his skin becoming reptilian and blue-green, the red spikes growing out of his face so fast they appeared in the blink of an eye.

"Whoa!" Ana exclaimed. "Kid, yer a Brachen demon? That explains the red eyes. Your boyfriend a demon?"

"Vampire."

"Holy hell on a stick. I guess that explains his magnetism."

Angel imagined that Kier would be offended by the implication that his charm was not his own, but he wasn't here, so who cared? Giles dropped his shield - he had to; he was visibly weakening from the strain - and he and Bren moved in on the animated corpses. (Angel didn't want to call them zombies, as he was pretty sure they weren't, even if they were currently acting like them.)

Without discussing it, Bren moved in on the group from the left, and he moved in on the group from the right. Bren used the baton to hit them on the side of the knee with crushing force, bringing them down, and Angel kicked them in the kneecaps, snapping the bones audibly, and occasionally he spun into high kicks that snapped their heads around and sent them falling back into the crowd of others. It didn't stop them, though - the corpses just walked over their compatriots, grabbing for them with hands as cold as ice and as unyielding as claws. Angel grabbed one of them by the arm and swung it around, slamming it face first into the wall, hard enough to crack both the drywall and its nose.

At the same time, Bren took a hit and slammed back across the room into Ana's futon, which shattered under his momentum and weight. It was a hard hit, but Bren would be fine - he was in his Brachen form, after all, and they could take a lot of damage.

Angel lashed out, kicking and punching anything that tried to get past him, but as they began to grab him more aggressively, tearing his clothes and raking his flesh with their fingernails, grabbing him by the hair as they swarmed around him like angry bees, he realized that they were hopelessly screwed.

* * *

Logan expected Scott to be upset about Xavier's death, but he didn't expect him to punch something again. At least it wasn't him this time.

What he hit was the crate that claimed it was full of hand grenades, and while he splintered a bit of the wood, mainly he just hurt his own fist, this time getting some slivers in his knuckles. Nothing exploded, though, so that was a plus.

Scott was still grumbling quietly to himself, picking the slivers out of his skin as he leaned against another section of crates, when Hel and Wes came back. Helga had that weird eye shaped mark on her forehead, the one that usually meant she was working under Moros's aegis - was she now, or was that necessary to get in touch with him? He wasn't sure, but the fact that she hadn't wiped the mark away yet gave him a bad feeling.

"Well, we're fucked," Helga pronounced.

Logan felt an almost inexplicable urge to chuckle. Fucked was such a common state for him he supposed he should make that his middle name. Of course, that would mean he'd have to decide if Logan was his first or last name. "What's goin' on?"

It was Wes who replied. He looked surprisingly glum, which was bad news in and of itself. "From what Helga told me Moros said, there's a battle going on between some disgruntled gods, who feel they've been given the short end of the stick when it comes to respect and territory."

"It's a war in heaven," Helga simplified. "And Earth is becoming the last battlefield."

"Why?" Logan wondered, looking between them.

They shared a glance, and Helga replied, "Some of the gods are playing dirty, and causing problems in the home dimensions of various gods, hoping to pull them off the front line."

"Diversion?" Scott guessed.

Wes nodded. "It'll also weaken the opponent's side. A death god apparently wants Bob to come back to Earth, which is why the starting point of this incident is Los Angeles."

Scott looked at him sharply. "Starting point?"

"It's gonna spread," Helga told him. "Slowly maybe, but the longer this goes on, the worse it'll get."

"But we can't call on Bob," Wesley continued gravely. "If he comes back, it'll be exactly what this god - whoever it is - wants."

"So we're on our own," Logan said. They both nodded. "Against a god?" Again with the stereo nods, although this time with matching worried frowns.

Somehow this gave new meaning to the term "fucked".


	5. Chapter 5

"Mortals can't fight gods," Logan pointed out, although it felt unnecessary. "They could kill us all with a sneeze. So how the fuck are we gonna do this?"

"We can't call in Bob," Helga replied. "I didn't say we couldn't call in other gods."

Scott fixed her with a skeptical look. "Will Moros help us?"

She scoffed. "No. But as long as I'm under his aegis I'm not going to die. He doesn't want me cluttering up his dimension."

Logan scoured his mind for any gods they knew that might help them - a small list to be sure - and remembered, "Rags. Holy shit, call him. He can bring the Gorgons in."

Wes nodded solemnly. "Yes, I brought that up. But there's a couple of problems with that. The first is that they can only tackle an area within their sight from whatever reflective surface they're manifesting in. Which means they could only help in small doses, and they have no way of weeding out the innocent from the afflicted - whoever is within their sight will be affected."

"The other problem is that Rags is in the hospital," Hel finished.

Logan stared at her in surprise. "The hospital? What happened?"

She sighed wearily. "Oh, the stupid shit finally did it. He drank so much he poisoned himself. He didn't show up at the Stone Temple one day and didn't answer his calls, and when he missed a liquid lunch date with Thrak, Thrak went to check on him. He found him comatose in a small pool of his own vomit. He's unconscious in the hospital right now, but he's expected to survive; he just needs to filter all the booze out of his system."

"Ah Jesus." What a perfect time for Rags's personal demons to grab him and throttle him. It didn't help that Logan always forgot alcohol poisoning was a possibility, because his own healing factor never even let him get drunk for long, if ever.

"Can someone else call up the Gorgons?" Scott asked. "He can't be the only one."

"He's the only Hierophant," Wes told him, nervously running a hand through his hair. "A lesser prelate could do it, though. The Gorgons are responsive to their worshippers, more so than any other gods. But the problems of before still apply."

"What is it with them and reflective surfaces?" Scott wondered.

Wes shifted into teacher mode, which he did a lot. It was a Watcher thing. "Two of the Gorgons can't physically manifest upon this plane. Their energies are so disruptive that they'd basically rip holes in the fabric of our reality if they did. Medusa, who has some mortal blood, can manifest in this reality without harm, but that's it, and usually she stays with her sisters. The three of them together are powerful enough that simply the energy funneled through their reflections can do massive damage."

Scott grunted, an acknowledgement of the facts without comment upon them.

Logan suddenly realized they had another ticket they could call in. "Degei. Hey, why don't we contact him? He always seems eager to help out Bob."

Wes nodded thoughtfully. "The snake god. I know for a fact that he's very helpful in a fight. Beyond you, he's the only being I've seen take down a Berserker. Well, his avatars took it down." Logan remembered him telling him about that - live snakes suddenly pouring out of a Berserker like its guts had been its nest. Totally fucking disgusting, and yet undeniably effective. "And he's a death god, technically, so he should be basically unbeatable. But I'm not sure how we get in touch with him. He's so obscure as gods go that there isn't much literature about him."

"Bob told me," Logan said, marveling that he had knowledge a Watcher didn't. Score one for him. "He said if you talked to any snake and mentioned Degei's name that he'd hear you."

Scott glared at him. "Talk to a snake?"

He glared right back. "I know it sounds stupid, but that's what he said. Supposedly all snakes everywhere are his avatars."

"Which is remarkable if true," Wes commented. "A few billion avatars. He must be incredibly powerful. It's a wonder he's so obscure."

"People generally don't like snakes," Helga said. "I don't think anyone would like considering the possibility that they might have real power somewhere." She crossed her arms over her chest and exhaled, as if letting out a breath she'd been holding too long. "Okay, I'll call the Stone Temple and see who they have taking Rags's place. Logan, you want to go see if you can contact Degei?"

Oh shit. "Why me?"

"You know how to do it," Scott pointed out. Was the bastard gloating?

"He knows your Bob's avatar," she told him. "He'll probably respond to you better than any of us. I think Bob might be his only friend, honestly. Even other gods get a bit creeped out by him."

Wes shrugged somewhat diffidently, although he was not disagreeing with her. "He is made of snakes. I imagine that can be ... disconcerting."

Hel smirked. "I bet that's what Bob liked about him. You know Bob and weird things. He's on 'em like ugly on Pat Buchanan."

Scott looked like he was struggling hard not to smile, and Logan glowered at him. He could guess just what he was thinking, and goddamn it, he was not weird! Okay, maybe he was - but weren't they all? Mutants, demons, and ghosts - none of them would win the normal sweepstakes at the moment.

"What about Ganesha?" Wes interjected, turning to Helga. "I was under the impression he was a good friend of Bob's."

She nodded. "He is, but he's not easy to get a hold of. I can try, but even if he did show up, what he could do for us would be limited. He doesn't use his powers for destruction, ever. He likes to say he's a lover not a fighter."

"But his power is suppression of entropy and chaos, yes? It's possible he could slow the spread of whatever it is that's afflicting the city."

She considered that and then slowly nodded. "Yeah, maybe. Okay, I'll put in a call to him, but I have no idea when he'll get back to me."

"Are there any other god friend of Bob's that you can think of that might pitch in here?" Logan wondered.

She both shrugged and shook her head. "Not that I can think of. But we still have another avenue open to us: Ressiks."

Scott groaned in distaste at the thought of the hyperviolent, thuggish reptilian demons, but Wesley nodded thoughtfully. "God killers. It was what they were made for. It's a shame they're about as trustworthy as a starving vampire in a blood bank."

"I know of a mercenary crew working out of Venice Beach that we could probably hire," Helga continued. "If they want their pay they'll do as we say, and besides, they piss me off, I'll cut off their heads and stick 'em on pikes around the bar. My reputation should help me when dealing with them."

Suddenly, surprisingly, Scott said, "I'll do it."

They all stared at him in varying degrees of shock. "What?" Logan asked first.

Scott seemed uncomfortable with the scrutiny, and his shrug came off as a partial fidget. "You all have something to do except for me, and I'm going crazy just sitting on my ass. I need to do something."

Helga and Logan exchanged skeptical glances, and Wes said, "I'll go too."

Scott frowned at him, but didn't protest, as what could Wes do in his current form? Basically all he could do was talk. Manipulating objects was difficult, and ghosts weren't known for their fighting skills. All Wes would be was well informed company. Scott eventually sighed and nodded, accepting it without a fight.

So they all had their little jobs to do. Now how the hell was he gonna find a snake in downtown Los Angeles?

5

Angel fought them off as best he could, but eventually the simple crush of bodies was overwhelming. A couple of them had him by the legs and dragged him down, and someone grabbed him from behind and started digging their thumbs into his eyes. He grabbed their arms and tried to rip their hands off him, throw them by their wrists, but he didn't have the proper leverage for the move and couldn't get up to achieve it. The pressure against his eyeballs was excruciating, the lights exploding before his eyes, and he was about to break their thumbs when he heard a sickening crack, and the person's hands slackened suddenly. Angel heard the corpse fall to the floor, and he heard a dull, meatier thud followed by Bren cursing, "Would you fucking zombies just give it up already? We're not even edible! We're like the last piece of jerky in the jar."

It was an odd statement, and Angel felt almost insulted at being compared to jerky (he wasn't _perfectly_ inedible …), but he jumped up to his feet and rejoined the fight as the corpses swarmed Bren, who had successfully distracted them. One of them had grabbed Bren by the neck and looked like they were trying to rip his head off, so Angel drove the flattened palm of his hand so hard into the side of the corpse's head, right where the jaw bone met the skull, that he felt the bones collapse under his hand like he'd hit an overripe pumpkin. It was disgusting, and yet disturbingly satisfying.

Then there was a sound that hit them like a sonic tidal wave. It was a word that wasn't a word, something not quite heard by the ears but felt in the body, and Angel was suddenly overwhelmed by the instinct to run. But he recognized the noise, the inexplicable burning feeling in his chest, and he forced himself to stand still as the animate corpses around him suddenly staggered, as if physically hit with something no one could see. Bren grabbed his arm, and he allowed him to pull him back farther into the apartment as the corpses began reeling backwards towards the door. Bren kept his hand on his arm, as if trying to physically anchor him to the room, and it actually helped as the noise continued.

Angel could see that Ana was using her necromancer talents again, but this time Giles held her hand, and their clasped hands were glowing with energy. Giles had his eyes closed in intense concentration and was sweating rather profusely, and it wasn't hard to figure out what was happening, even if Angel wasn't sure of the logistics of it. Ana's first attempt to repel the dead was too weak, so Giles was using his power to augment it, and this time it was like a tsunami, overwhelming the most insistent defenses. Angel assumed that having a soul was probably the only thing keeping him resisting the sound, but it wasn't easy. Maybe it was just that he was accustomed to fighting his own impulses at this point. He was aware Bren was bleeding, he could smell his blood, but it was half-tempting and half-disgusting, with that sour Brachen undertone corrupting the nicer Human bit. The dichotomy was also helping him focus.

Finally the corpses had retreated, obeying orders, and Ana pulled her hand out of Giles's grip, shaking her hand like she'd touched a hot stove. "Goddamn it, Grandpa, you trying to fry me?"

Giles wavered unsteadily on his feet, and Bren let Angel's arm go so he could catch him before he could hit the floor. "Would you just shut the fuck up?" Bren suddenly snapped at Ana, reverting to Human face and wiping the blood off his face with the back of his hand. "If it wasn't for him we'd be zombie chow right now. So let's say we get the hell out of here and you can the smart ass insults, huh?"

Ana's head snapped back as if he'd punched her, and she stared at him for a long moment, expression stony, before her face cracked in a smile, and she chuckled. "Damn, kiddo, I got you wrong. Here I thought you were just a cute WeHo twink, and you're some kind of macho demon hunter type who hangs with a bunch of others. So you guys are what, like the Ghostbusters, only … Vampbusters? Zombinators?"

Giles wasn't unconscious, but being an energy conduit had left him so wiped out that keeping his eyes open was about all he could do. Angel draped his arm over his shoulders and held him up as he told her, "We'll explain on the way."

She shrugged and retrieved a pair of rhinestone encrusted sunglasses from beside her sink. As Angel helped Giles out the door and Bren followed, Ana pulling up the rear, she asked, "So who's gonna replace my futon?"

They could have come across a more annoying necromancer. But it would have been hard.

* * *

For all its negatives - and there were so many you had to give up counting at some point - Los Angeles did have some good points. Namely, nothing was too weird for it not exist somewhere in this city. Case in point: a pet store that specialized in snakes and reptiles only, the more exotic the better. Logan found it in the phone book, and briefly wondered if it could possibly still be open.

Yes, it was. It was on Hollywood Boulevard, and was small, cramped, and claustrophobic, a store in a tight space that would have been better suited to something more minor, like tchotchkes or grade A tourist crap. It smelled fusty, like too much reptile pee. The clerk was a twenty two year old kid with a yellow streaked faux-hawk and a nose ring big enough to have been a link of a chain, with a spider web tattoo taking up most of the left side of his neck. He asked if he could help him, and he told the kid he was just here to look at some snakes.

This led to the kid to suddenly list what sounded like every snake known to mankind. He either didn't notice or didn't care about the dirty look he was giving him, so Logan rolled his eyes and picked king snake at random. That was a small snake, right?

The guy led him to a back wall full of glass tanks, in which were all sorts of snakes curled up under heat lamps on rocks, or inside fake plastic hollow logs. The king snake was bright red, with yellow and black bands, curled up like a waiting lasso on a flat fake rock. "Can I handle it?" he asked the kid, not sure if the thing could hear him through the glass. Wait a minute, did snakes hear at all? How did that work?

The kid looked at him funny for a second, then shrugged and went through a door marked "Employees Only". He was soon on the other side of the wall full of tanks, where he took the lid off and pulled out the snake. He came back through the employee's door, and held out the snake.

It was longer than he thought it would be, but still slender and not at all near boa size, and as he took it, its scales felt dry and warm under his fingers. He held it up to eye level and turned his back on the kid as the snake's tongue darted out to taste the air. "Degei, listen, I'm Bob's avatar and we need your help now," he said in a low voice, hoping the hum of the air conditioner drowned him out.

"Are you talking to it?" the kid asked.

Oh god, he felt like an asshole. But still he continued. "I wouldn't ask, but it's an emergency."

"You're not a snake handler, are you?"

Logan turned back to the kid, not sure what he was asking. "Huh?"

"You know, a snake handler. One of those religious people that handles snakes." He reached out to take the king snake back, but it suddenly wound its way around Logan's arm and dropped down to the floor. The kid bent down to get it, and that's when a whole bunch of other snakes started pouring out from underneath the crack in the inner door. "Whoa!" he exclaimed, startled. "Benjy! We got a situation out here!"

The snakes started gathering together into a pile, and the kid backed up towards the employee door, carefully stepping over the snake river, while Logan just waited where he was. That was a quicker response than he thought, but hey, he wasn't going to knock it.

The pile eventually formed into the shape of a man with black and red scaled skin marked with silver diamond shapes, his face forming last, starting from the lipless mouth and ending with the opening of two tangerine sized, slit pupiled yellow eyes. "Oh yes, Logan," Degei said. "I remember you."

"Holy fuck!" the kid screamed, completely scared out of his mind.

Degei gestured vaguely towards him, and said, "Forget." The kid blinked for a minute, looking deeply confused. "So what is the emergency?"

Logan gestured up the aisle towards the cloudy glass door. "I'll show ya."

As they walked out of the store, the guy who must have been Benjy came out of the back, and asked the kid, "What the hell were you screaming about?"

The kid answered, in genuine confusion, "I have no idea."

Once out on the street, no one gave him and the five foot five naked bald guy made completely of snakeskin a second glance. Only in Los Angeles, huh? Oh, well, maybe New York too. (In deference to modesty, Degei didn't bother to manifest genitalia … or what he had didn't look like anything he'd ever seen before. Which, he now realized, was not something he wanted to think about.) Degei looked around at the ghosts and animated dead amongst otherwise unconcerned and unnoticing people, his nictitating membranes sliding over his eyes with the slightest dry clicking sound. "Oh dear. What's happened here?"

The weirdest thing about this? Although there were many things to choose from, Logan found the fact that he had an accent more reminiscent of New Zealand than Fiji a bit more disconcerting than everything else, and he wasn't sure why. "We think that -"

Degei faced him and held up a finger, making a shushing noise that sounded like a hiss. He stared at him for a long moment with those alien, reptilian eyes, and he had the impression he was being stared through like he was a ghost. Finally, Degei lowered his hand, and those see through membranes clicked over his eyes again. "This is a bit of a pickle, isn't it?"

_A bit of a pickle?!_ What god used that kind of language?!

Wow. It was one of those moments when it struck him how fucking bizarre his life was.

The ghost of a middle aged man in a Brooks Brothers suit attempted to walk through them, but stopped cold and looked at them in confusion. "You can't walk through me, son," Degei told him. "I'm a god."

Now see, Logan didn't know that. Ghosts could walk through everything but gods?

The man did a bit of a double take, which was extremely comical when a ghost did it. "God? You're god? Oh my g … shit, is this the Rapture?"

Degei looked at him with naked curiosity. "The what now?"

Logan scratched his head and tried to remember what it exactly was. "It's … uh … some people believe it's … uh … it's something like the souls of believers or the righteous or some such bullshit are taken up to Heaven while all us heathen sinner assholes get left behind."

"Which heaven?" Degei asked innocently.

Logan shrugged - he had no idea - and the ghost exclaimed, "What do you mean _which_ heaven?"

Degei gave him a strange look, like he feared the guy was brain damaged and unstable. "What do _you_ mean which heaven? And why would a god want souls? Unless they ate them."

The ghost looked shocked, appalled, and horrified. _"What?"_ he finally sputtered.

Logan had enough of this bullshit. "Accept, adapt, and move on, Casper. We have a world to fix, 'kay?"

The ghost looked between them, his look vacillating between real fear and genuine shock. He took several steps back, almost phasing into the storefront, and said, "You're Satan, aren't you?"

Neither he nor Degei knew who he was lobbing that at. Logan was about to say yeah, he was, but Degei said, "Satan is a concept, not a proper physical manifestation."

The ghost glared at them both, made the sign of the cross at the both of them, and walked off. Degei, assuming it was some sort of parting gesture, made the cross back at him. Logan almost laughed. The serpentine god turned back to him with the most bizarrely innocent look on his face. He hadn't dealt with Humans for a long time - possibly ever - and he clearly found them more than a bit baffling. "Are they all like that?"

"The ghosts? Nah. Some are even more annoyin'. Look, you got any idea who might be doing this?"

"I have several ideas," he said. "But I will need to know how this started to narrow things down."

"We don't know how it started. It just did."

"Hmm." He glanced down at the sidewalk, and stood in that posture for about a minute, neither moving or reacting to anything going on around them. Logan cleared his throat loudly, and almost touched his arm, but Degei radiated a palpable power that surrounded him as snugly as an aura - you couldn't really feel it until you got very close, and then it was like trying to touch an open flame.

"Uh, Degei?" No reaction. He waved a hand in front of his huge eyes. Again, no response. He was getting nervous when suddenly Degei moved, springing to life so suddenly Logan almost jumped.

"One of my snakes has seen something interesting at a cemetery just north of here," he proclaimed, and then started walking down the street like he knew where he was going. Logan had to scramble after him. He supposed he should take some comfort in the fact that he had taken the job so readily, but there was some question as to what Degei could actually _do_ here. Yes, if they needed snakes to attack or eat people, they had that covered … but what else could he actually do? He was a good ally to have, but what he could do to turn the tide of dead was an open question, and he hadn't volunteered any solutions yet. Mainly, he was good for striking fear and unease in the hearts of almost everyone. Okay, it wasn't the best plan in the world, but that's how desperate they were.

"What is it your snake saw?" Logan asked, and suddenly felt like a complete dick. Well, he was a snake god - he should have expected that he'd soon say something like that to him.

"Demons crawling out of a hell pit," he replied, almost cheerfully.

It was L.A. - there was a small possibility that was normal. But he wasn't about to bet on it.


	6. Chapter 6

6

For whatever reason, Helga had told him exactly how to react to the Ressiks, as if dealing with boorish thugs was somehow new to him. Still, Scott listened to her script and agreed to stick to it, if only because Wesley was listening and watching.

Besides, it gave him something to focus on besides the fact that the Professor was dead, and that Jean was dead - and had killed him and the Professor alike. Oh, and Logan had killed _her_. He had too many feelings to know what to do with them, and they tangled in on themselves like a ball of string - he was angry, upset, disbelieving, sad, furious, defeated, sick. When had things spiraled so out of control? How had everything boiled down to this?

He blamed Bob. And Logan - Logan brought Bob into their lives. Who knew gods actually existed, and that they would turn out to be like this? Petty, venal, egotistical, power hungry, selfish, childish, vicious, twisted … in other words, just like people. That was the most depressing thing - they were no better or worse than people. That wasn't right; gods were supposed to be better. Weren't they? That's what he was always taught. Of course, he was also taught there was just the one god, and that was clearly wrong. There were apparently more gods than clowns in a clown car. (Which didn't sound right, and yet it was somehow appropriate all the same.)

Storm leading the X-Men wasn't too bad a thought … as long as he didn't add Logan in as a leader as well. Damn, those poor kids! But as long as he was here, he wasn't teaching them how to kill or maim. Although the irony that the guy who was willing to kill and maim survived past him didn't escape him; it was so bitter, he wished he could spit it out. Not that it would have changed the outcome if he had been more amoral; he'd never have hurt Jean.

Wesley was a quiet companion, which he appreciated. Of course, it may have had something to do with the fact that he had to concentrate to stay completely solid, but who knew? At least he was almost an X-Man - admittedly, Scott still wasn't sure how that would have worked had Wesley accepted the Professor's offer. Fighting using your natural gifts was one thing. Fighting with magic? That was another. Also, a bit hard for him to accept, even though he'd seen it for himself. But in the end, it hadn't saved Wesley either - he too was dead. Scott mentally dubbed them "The Loser Brigade". They faced danger head on, and goddamn, they got crushed like fucking bugs. Perhaps it was to their credit that, having already died, they weren't gunshy about facing danger again.

The Ressiks had a house overlooking the ocean, but that was slightly misleading - the house was at the end of a paved drive on a shallow cliff, so while they got to look at the ocean, the beach below wasn't theirs; it probably belonged to the person who had the huge mansion farther Northeast and directly on the beach. Not that it wasn't very nice, or that Scott wouldn't have wanted the house, but somehow having a beach house meant usually having a beach, not just a precipitous drop onto someone else's beach. They approached the sprawling, pale orange colored house on foot, but once they were within fifty feet of the place, Wesley said, "I'll go on ahead, see if they're lying in wait."

"Isn't it rude to just barge in?"

Wesley shrugged, and then smiled in a slightly mischievous way. "When you're a ghost, that's all you can do."

He had a point, So he let him go - what could he have done to hold him back? And that was a positive, as the Ressiks couldn't possibly hurt him. How did you hurt a ghost? Not only are you already dead, you're intangible. Proving that, Wesley walked through the outside wall of their house and disappeared. He was nearing the porch when he heard a gunshot, and heard Wesley say witheringly, "I'm a ghost, you idiot. Do you really think you can hurt me with a gun?"

Scott wondered if he should be bothered by their being armed and willing to use them as he stepped up onto their porch and pounded on the door. Why should he? He was dead already; they might be able to kill him again, but if Helga was right, he'd come right back in another body or as a ghost. Of course, he might not be so lucky in another body. This guy had some muscles, which made up a little for not having any mutant abilities. What if the next body he ended up in was that of a hundred year old grandmother with a bad hip? He figured it was probably in his best interest not to get killed, at least if he could at all help it.

The door was flung open, and he found himself looking down the barrel of a Glock 9. "What the fuck d'ya want?" The green demon snarled.

Fun. At least Helga's theory on how he'd be greeted was a hundred percent correct. "I'm a friend of Helga's, she sent me to hire you. Will you get that fucking gun out of my face?" Helga's script - which Wesley agreed with - was to meet belligerence with belligerence, and to curse at them if they cursed at him. The Ressiks were an aggressive species, and only respected aggression - if you acquiesced to them at any point, they assumed you were prey that deserved to be torn up, eaten, and pissed on. Of course showing fear was an absolute no no, unless he felt like getting beaten to death with his own arm. Well, somebody else's arm (this wasn't his original body).

The demon peered at him with a big copper eye, his lizardy face unreadable to Scott. They just always looked like pissed off gila monsters to him. "Since when would Helga send a Human?"

He saw Wesley appear behind the Ressik, and he nodded at him. The Ressik must have felt the shift in air current, as he glanced over his shoulder, and that's when he grabbed the Ressik's gun arm, twisting it until it was on the verge of breaking, and slammed a flattened palm straight into the center of its face, where a nose would have been if it had had one. (They just had small holes, no actual nose.) As the Ressik staggered back - straight through Wesley - Scott barged in the house. "Since she's busy, asshole. Do you want to talk business or not?"

"The Seven Saurian should be appearing right behind me," Wesley said, as indeed seven Ressiks, ranging in color from swamp green to sewage brown, appeared in the open archway of the living room, all aiming guns at him through the slightly transparent form of Wesley. Scott didn't blink, as he knew he had to appear unconcerned and even unconvinced by this violent display of machismo. "Just like clockwork," Wesley said, quite pleased with himself.

"Give us one reason not to kill you," one of the Ressiks demanded. Although it was a racist - specist? - thing to think, all Ressiks _did_ generally look alike. They were all between five foot seven to six foot seven in height, around two hundred pounds of pure muscle (they didn't look slender nor fat; they had the squarish build of your average linebacker, regardless of actual height or weight), with only variations in scale color and eyes available to tell them apart. The one demanding answers from the archway was about six six and nearing three hundred pounds, his scales the color of fresh mud and his eyes as brass as pennies. He wore a peach Versace suit that struck Scott as hilarious, but he knew better than to laugh at a bunch of testosterone poisoned demons with firearms.

Scott pulled out the marked bundle of money Helga had given him, and held it up so they could see it. "How about six thousand of them?"

The Ressik with the bruised ego (and face) crept closer to look at the money, and scowled evilly. "They're marked."

Indeed it was. Helga, with Wesley's help, had put a symbol on the stack of money using some kind of concoction that smelled like sour milk and peppermint candy. "That's right. Accept the job and the seal will be removed. Kill me, and the money will burst into flame in five minutes. Make up your minds fast."

They lowered their weapons, the leader - if that's what the mud colored demon was - scowled evilly at him. "She's gotta 'nother hex on the money, don't she?"

Scott gritted his teeth at the horrible grammar. "Only to keep you honest. So do we have a deal, or do I find someone else?"

Even Wesley turned to watch them as they considered this, muscles jumping in all their jaws like they were all grinding their teeth. After a long moment, where Scott could hear the distressingly Human like scream of a seagull on the beach below, the mud colored one asked, "What's the job?"

"It involves lots of killing." He was supposed to keep it vague until they worked out the details.

He snorted, an interesting sound from a being with no discernable nose. "Well, why didn't 'cha say so?" He came forward and ripped the wad of money of money out of his hand. "Where do we start?"

Of course it was a victory, but it still made Scott feel slightly queasy.

* * *

Logan was sure he'd seen a good number of the cemeteries around L.A. proper, but he'd never seen this one before.

It was small, though, low rent, going to seed. Most of the scraggly trees in the place looked dead or dying, and if there were any celebrities buried here, it was the minor ones from the silent age. The fact that it wasn't far from Hollywood Boulevard really surprised him, as he didn't think there were any cemeteries close to the main drag, but you learned something new every day. It looked like it could have been a horror movie set, and he was busy looking for signs that it wasn't.

The cemetery had either been shut down, or just wasn't used anymore, as a large iron gate - rusty in patches, like it had some type of fungal infection - was closed when they approached it. Without touching it, it swung open, and Logan was left wondering how Degei had done that. Was it not locked, or was "snake power" somehow involved in this?

God, what a bizarre life he led. Snake power?

The wind shifted, and Logan could smell it, as the smoggy, exhaust tinged miasma that was Los Angeles in his mind became replaced by a scent not unlike flesh being burned by lava and seasoned with rotting organ meats and old blood. "Is that them?" Logan wondered, wrinkling his nose at the scent. God, it was disgusting; he could taste it in his mouth.

Degei did something really odd - he stuck out a black forked tongue, quickly tasting the air. He tilted his head as he digested the scent. "Carrion eaters. Hmm. I wonder if the excessive dead are attracting them."

"They're corpse eaters?"

Degei dipped his head in what he must have thought was a nod, but was honestly too odd for it. "They're an efficient recycling system. Although I can't imagine that the resurrected dead would appreciate their new bodies being eaten with them inside them."

"Yeah, I can't see that goin' down well."

They crossed weedy lawns and fallen, crumbling tombstones, some vandalized, some missing entirely, until they were within sight of a large oak that looked dead, its huge gnarled trunk and twisted branches looking black even in the raging sunlight of a Southern Californian afternoon. Beneath it was a tilted, crumbling tombstone, and just under the tree's long shadows, another shadow moved. No, it was the pit, from whence came the corpse eaters.

These were not a type of demon he recognized. They had long, narrow heads filled with jagged, sharp teeth, and three tiny eyes like marbles, glassy and only semi-opaque, their skin like hardened leather, colored the gray of landfill muck. They looked a lot like vaguely humanoid crocodiles, although they came out of the pit on all fours and didn't look terribly humanoid in their sinuous walk. There were about a half dozen around the pit, which was a hole in the earth about ten feet across. Due to the tilt of the land and the odd shape of the hole, it was impossible to look inside it unless you were standing on the edge.

"Ammaati," Degei said, coming to a stop. When the demons all looked at them, Logan realized that that's what the demons were called. "This is not your plane. Why are you here?"

There was a snort of derision from the demons, and a reddish one on the near side of the pit looked at them with what could have been disdain, but their faces were not overly expressive. They were long, lean, and awkward, with all their teeth and small glassy eyes giving them the cold, vacant look of a serial predator. "Thiss iss not your place either, ssnake," the Ammaati snarled. It had a definite lisp, but it sounded more dangerous than comical. Logan found it amazing that they could make any kind of speech at all with those weird mouths.

"No, but I go where I please. You do not have the same leave. Return to where you came."

More derisive snorts followed, sounding almost like the deep croaks of toads. "The dead are rife here. We are simply here to eat."

"You're not wanted here. Go."

"You have no ssay here."

"I do," Logan said, popping his claws. "This is my dimension. Get the fuck out."

There was a noise like a rolling tremor, and he realized gradually that it was the Ammaati laughing. "Go away, Human, before we eat you."

"Try it, handbag."

"He's Bob's avatar," Degei pointed out.

_That_ made them stop laughing, stop snorting. The reddish one tilted its head and looked at him as a bird might. Even with three eyes, Logan had the impression they had very poor peripheral vision. "Bob? Iss he here?"

"You know he's not; that's why you're here," Degei said, and then, with no foreplay whatsoever, the pit was overflowing with snakes, black and red and green and yellow writhing bodies that caused the Ammaati to let out animalistic shrieks of surprise as many coming out of the pit or sitting near its edge were suddenly pulled down into the undulating mass of snakes. "Where are you from, why did you come?" Degei demanded, as huge boa constrictors - in fact, impossibly large ones, unless this was a movie set - materialized in the branches over the heads of the remaining demons. The tree sagged under their weight, and it was likely it wouldn't last much longer; Logan heard the branches creaking, starting to crack.

The reddish one realized he was screwed, but you only heard it in his voice - his expression didn't change. "We meant no harm -"

"The Ogdoad used to have a saying: There are two things in this multiverse - gods and food. I'm a god. What does that make you?"

Okay, that was it; Degei was a bad ass. Groveling commenced. "W-we meant no harm. We just -"

"Where are you from? How did you know this realm was open?"

"We heard rumorss in the Hall of Two Truthss -"

"Thoth's realm," Degei interrupted, for Logan's benefit. What an odd name for a dimension. "Who was spreading this rumor?"

"I don't know. We just hear; we are ignored."

"Have you heard rumors about how this started? Who might be behind this?"

"There are many. The mosst disstresssing iss the rumor that Erlik hass been freed."

"Erlik?" There was something in Degei's voice like shock, and he frowned. "Go back, close the dimension behind you. Never come back. You know Thoth will not be pleased."

The Ammaati nodded vigorously, and looked down at the pit. The snakes immediately disappeared - where to Logan had no idea, although the gigantic boas remained in the tree - and the reddish one disappeared into the pit, along with one or two others that escaped the initial snake deluge. A minute or so after they went in, the hole seemed to seal up.

"That was weird," Logan said. The boas were gone; Logan hadn't seen them go.

But Degei stood there, his arms crossed over his barrel chest, tongue flicking out nervously as he stared at the churned dirt where the physical yet metaphysical dimensional rift had been. Had he heard him? Had he zoned out on him?

"Degei?"

Finally the snake god spoke, but he was still staring at the dirt. "I'm sure this is Erlik's doing. We have a problem."

"You mean beyond the obvious?"

"Yes."

Great; just great. At least he hadn't expected something good.

* * *

They didn't encounter anymore hostile dead on their way back to the office, but then again, they mostly stuck to the sewer where the dead were absent. Angel was glad about that, because while Giles recovered a bit along the way, Ana got no less annoying.

Angel was expecting chaos back at the office - he even imagined it was under siege - but they found nothing of the sort. The office was the same as they left it, with the dead clogging the street outside, a potential threat but not a current one. They came in to find Kier on the phone behind the desk, while Marc, Naomi, and Matt were still sitting on the sofa, with Xander futzing with the coffee machine, and Sid flipping through an old book, still leaning against the wall, as if he hadn't moved an inch since they left. As they came in, Kier sat forward, and said, "Hey, great, you're back. Bren, do you know who's taking over for Rags at the Stone Temple? Helga's been trying to get a hold of them to find out, but no one's picking up the phone."

Bren sighed and headed for the desk as Kier held out the receiver towards him. "Holy shit, I'm not really sure," Bren said, grabbing the phone.

Ana looked around the office, and commented, "Wow, what a shitty place."

"With that hairdo, should you be insulting anybody?" Xander pointed out.

Ana looked him up and down, and not in a friendly manner. "And what are you supposed to be? The comic relief?"

"We could throw you back outside," Giles warned her, as Angel lowered him down to the couch. He didn't need much help, but if he hadn't helped him sit down he would have collapsed.

Angel caught everyone up on who Ana was and what had occurred back at her place. Xander caught them up on what went on while they were gone, which was summed up in the phrase "fuck all". The phone call from Helga was the most interesting thing that had occurred. As it was, Helga was trying to find someone capable of summoning the Gorgons, which was a good idea, although Angel wondered how that was going to work. They couldn't cover that broad an area, could they?

It was then that they all got the second big shock of the day. "Well, um … I guess I could try and summon them," Bren sheepishly told Helga. "Rags's been teaching me."

"What?" Giles exclaimed first, just as surprised as Angel felt. Summoning the Gorgons was no small thing. Yes, they were the most "user friendly" of the gods, but invoking any gods was not a minor feat - it required an energy expenditure on the part of the invoker. Rags, being a Persaid demon, had energy to burn. But Bren?

Bren rolled his shoulders, his face coloring slightly blue-green in embarrassment. "I don't know why, but Rags seemed to think it was important I know how to do it. He even gave me my own mirror shield. He said there might be a time when we would need the "big guns" when no one else was available, although he never said why that might be. I've never done it yet, though."

Angel and Giles shared a knowing look, as Helga audibly demanded he go get his goddamn shield pronto. Rags knew about Kier's "specialness", and knew the danger if his fate as the Ascendant ever came to pass. He'd be very hard to kill, especially from Bren's perspective, since he'd never want to kill him anyways. But being able to summon the Gorgons was essentially a supernatural nuclear weapon - if he pushed that button, Kier would be dead the instant they showed up. Kier couldn't be special enough to hold up against gods.

"I'll go get it," Kier volunteered, and Angel had to fight to keep his expression neutral. Did Kier know? Had he figured it out? His pretty face was perfectly unreadable, but he really wasn't that bad of an actor.

Bren, who apparently hadn't put it together that this was an emergency weapon to use against his vampire lover if things ever went horrendously bad, held the receiver to his shoulder and asked, "Are you sure? Do you know where it is?"

Kier nodded. "It's the weird mirror in the hallway, right? I'll take the sewers and get it; I should be back in five minutes."

Bren nodded in agreement, and Kier leaned in to give him a quick kiss before heading out the door. Bren and Kier had moved in together sometime last month, mainly because Bren was tired of his apartment and Kier was looking at eviction from his crypt since it was due to be torn down. They had a place only a few blocks away, which meant that now Bren was always the first one in the office in the morning or at night - whenever they decided to open. He'd always been industrious, but this seemed absurd somehow.

Since the dead were leaving the sewer alone, and Kier was a vampire, they let him go off on his own. Once he was gone, Giles asked Ana, "Have you angered any other necromancers?"

Ana glared at him, but he noticed she was eyeing Sid rather lasciviously out of the corner of her eye. Sid went on reading, oblivious to being ogled. "What, you think they were after me? They were after you guys."

Angel wondered if that was possible. Ana seemed like the most natural target of the attack, but since it happened after they arrived at her apartment, it could have very well been them. "Why do you say that?"

Before she could say, the door opened, and Logan came in with an odd man who looked like a large snake with two legs. Xander made a startled noise and nearly bobbled his coffee cup. "Fuck, are you a snake?" Oh, that was right - Xander really didn't like snakes. It had to do with a Sunnydale incident he was sure.

The man - who was undoubtedly Degei; he gave off a sense of power Angel could feel across the room - blinked with clear eyelids, and replied, "I'm of snakes, yes."

"We'll get to the origin story in a minute, okay?" Logan interjected impatiently. "This thing is a lot worse than we thought."

"Is that even possible?" Marc asked. A fair question.

Logan nodded grimly, and Degei said, "The personification of evil is loose in Los Angeles."

"Dick Cheney's here?" Xander cracked.

Nobody laughed, but Angel had to admit that was one of his better jokes.


	7. Chapter 7

7

According to both Degei and Giles's books, Erlik was more than simply bad news. It was basically time to send out the lifeboats if they had any, which they didn't. Angel wished, not for the first time, that they had some.

Erlik was the long time prisoner of Ulgan, a creator god, as he didn't trust Erlik to be loose since he was the embodiment of evil and all, and had also killed his trusted messenger for no reason other than he was there. Degei didn't know how to kill him, and wasn't sure if he _could _be killed - there was some debate about whether or not Elrik was an elemental god, and the books were no help at all. There was also no descriptions of his power, and even Degei wasn't completely sure. According to him, he was pretty sure he could manipulate souls and possibly "mold the earth", but beyond that Degei had no firsthand knowledge of his powers, or even second or third hand. Erlik had been "inactive" for a millennia or so.

Wesley had joined them by this time, having left Scott with Helga and the Ressiks at the bar. So they had their wrecking crew, they just had to figure out how best to use them. Logan wondered if Degei couldn't just take Erlik down, but Degei said it depended on what forms he could take. If he was corporeal, sure his snakes could kill him (the way Degei said this, it was implicit that his snakes could kill everything with a physical form - Angel noticed Xander shudder), but if Erlik could be active in a semi-corporeal or totally non-corporeal state, there was a problem. This wasn't his realm or one of the higher or lower realms; this was earth. And for some reason, that put a stricture on Degei's snakes.

If Bob were here, it wasn't a problem - all implications were this was considered "his" realm, so whatever state Erlik was in, he was gone. But Bob wasn't here, and they couldn't call him. So they had to find a new way to deal with this.

It was Wesley who spoke first. "The Book of Tarlak."

The name rang bells for Angel, but he couldn't immediately place it. Giles did, though, by the horrified look on his face. "I'm not sure we're quite that desperate yet."

"Ain't that Terry Pratchett's new novel?" Ana asked sarcastically.

Everyone ignored her. She was no Xander. "What's that? It sounds familiar," Angel said.

Giles gave him a wary look, like he wasn't sure he should tell him, but Wesley answered him. "It's a book full of spells of dark magic. Most are considered taboo, as close to illegal as spells can get."

Giles was shaking his head. "Even if we knew where a copy was -"

"I do," Wesley interrupted. "Wolfram and Hart has several copies in their library. I'll just go grab one. I'm a ghost now; there's not much they can do to stop me."

"We're not using it," Giles insisted.

"I'll take the burden of the spell," Wesley countered smoothly, not in the least deterred by Giles's obstinacy. "I'm already dead. I can't be hurt much more."

"Yes you can," Giles shot back.

"No I can't."

Matt nudged Marc, and whispered. "Are they always like this?" Marc just shrugged.

"Let the dead guy do what he wants," Logan interrupted. He then cast a slightly sheepish glance at Wesley, and said, "No offense."

"None taken."

"Wesley," Giles said sternly, in full Watcher lecture mode. "You know very well that being dead doesn't preclude worse things happening to you."

Wesley sighed wearily, as if already tired of this argument. "Rupert, do you know what I remember after being killed? Nothing. Nothing until I appeared back on the street in an intangible form. I'm not in the happy afterlife promised us dedicated Watchers; I'm not even in a demon's thrall in some dark dimension. I ceased to exist. I was nothing. Do you really think I give a flying bloody fuck what happens to my immortal soul now? Heaven doesn't want me and hell won't have me. It doesn't matter what I do right now, because the end result will be the same. I'll be turned away from all gates; I've done too much bad to be allowed a seat at the good table, but I've done too much good for the bad to trust me. No matter what I do, I will cease to exist as soon as this is over. I might as well give everyone a good reason for avoiding me." Wesley stared at Giles defiantly, and Giles met it with a stony look that gave nothing away.

After a moment of silence, Naomi said, "You're both forgetting the most important thing here - these spells, will they help us against Erlik?"

Wesley nodded. "They should, if we use the right one. There's one that might be able to trap him in a corporeal form, at least temporarily."

"And if he's in a body, we can kill him," Logan said, just to fill in any of those who didn't get it.

"We'll only get one shot at it," Angel reminded them. "If we're going to do this, we need to be sure it'll work."

"It'll work," Wesley insisted. "Wolfram and Hart did their best to hide that spell. They wouldn't if it was a waste of time."

Unless it was a trap, but Wesley believed it wasn't, and that was good enough for Angel. He owed Wesley that if nothing else. Giles looked at him, but seemed to understand that he was siding with Wesley here, and there was no talking him out of it.

"Before we make any plan, we have to have a way to find Erlik and draw him out," Marc said, jumping in with the casualness of someone who always worked here. Not that Angel minded - right now, they needed all the help they could get.

"Gods know gods," Degei said. "If I make my presence known, he should come."

"Why?" Bren asked. "To ask you to lunch?"

Facetiousness aside, it was a good question.

"To ask me why I'm here," Degei responded blandly. "To try and kill me if I get in his way."

Xander scoffed faintly. "So why do you want to make your presence known to him again?"

"He can't really kill me," Degei replied. "I'm a god of the death realm. He'll simply try."

"Why can't we contact this Ulgan?" Sid wondered.

"You don't contact a creator god. If they want to talk to you, they'll let you know." Degei told him, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. It occurred to Angel that Bob probably would have barged in on him anyways, as he wasn't known for obeying rules, but Degei just wasn't that rude. As death gods went, he seemed surprisingly nice.

They had to plan this carefully if this was to work, but ironically, there were a thousand things they didn't know. Nearly all of them knew from experience that there was no way to successfully plan around the unknown, but they had to try. They couldn't let evil continue to stalk the city unfettered, and they still weren't sure what all these wandering dead could possibly mean except perhaps a ready army whenever Elrik decided to strike.

Was he ready to die again? Angel wasn't honestly sure, but he supposed he'd better get ready for the possibility.

* * *

Once again, Logan felt like he was in a horror movie. This was yet another great set.

Amongst the piers that made Santa Monica semi-famous was one still hosting a run down carnival, even though both the pier and the carnival had been shut down for almost a year. According to Bren, someone died on a ride, and the whole thing was shut down due to safety issues, but the business responsible for setting it up had already fled the state, so the carnival remained where it was, rotting like a neglected tooth. It seemed like a natural place for a personification of evil.

That wasn't why they were here, though. Degei thought it best they do this as far from the majority of dead people and "open earth" as possible. Angel suggested the piers, and Bren remembered the old carnival, and they all figured that was an apt place for everything to go down.

The problem was fighting a god could get them all killed the millisecond they showed up. The answer was getting under the aegis of a god, so they had some protection, but the problem was who would be willing to do such a large number at the last moment. Degei said he'd be willing to have them all under his aegis, and it didn't matter that he was on this plane at the same time. He promised to kick them back the very second they died, although he admitted if a vampire got dusted or decapitated, that would be extremely difficult and perhaps not possible. So Angel and Kier were on notice that under Degei's good graces or not, they had to be even more careful than the rest of them.

The plan they pieced together had lots of holes in it, but it was unavoidable. There was so much they didn't know that it was a complete pain in the ass. At least Logan was used to going in partially blind; Angel seemed accustomed to it too.

Giles and Wesley went off to work on the spells, although Giles still didn't seem happy about it. But Wesley seemed to have won the argument, which made Logan wonder why Watchers were promised some happy ever after afterlife. Did it ever work? There was some type of "Watchers go to heaven" belief system? Didn't they - of all people - know better? Maybe even amongst the people who should have known better, hope sprung eternal.

Logan wondered if he ever believed in happily ever after. He thought that maybe he really wanted to believe in reincarnation, but only that he wanted to because Mariko believed it (or he thought she did - he had no clear memories, just vague feelings). Because she thought it was a nifty idea, he wanted to think that too. He wasn't sure he ever did, though; he just nailed down the "wanting to" part.

They cut Ana loose. She was a pain in the ass who didn't want to take part in any fight, and they didn't know what she could do anyways, so if she wanted to risk getting torn apart by zombies, that was her choice. Logan actually wondered if Angel and Giles were the target of the attack anyways. If Elrik had any sense, he'd know he'd want them out of the way - they were the best chance to stop him in lieu of Bob. It was simply good strategy to take out the biggest threat before starting … whatever it was you were starting. That's where Magneto fucked up last time, which Logan attributed to creeping old age. It happened to everybody, even freaked out old megalomaniacs.

In all honesty, they could have cut loose everyone except him, Marc, Bren, Kier, Helga, Angel, Wesley, and Giles, because no one else could possibly contribute much to the fight. (Degei and the Ressiks were in their own separate categories.) But Matt wasn't straying far from Marc, even though he wasn't sure what the fuck was going on, and Sid, Scott, and Naomi weren't going to sit this out, even if their abilities here were limited. Xander was completely fucking useless, but insisted on sticking around anyways. Did the guy have a death wish? He wasn't a mutant or a demon, he wasn't even a gifted physical fighter - he had fuck all. All he brought to the table was snark. Seriously, he should have taken Ana out for coffee. Those two were just made for each other.

They had to wait for sundown for the fight, of course, but the non-vampiric amongst them - everybody but Angel and Kier - were able to get out there early and find their places. The sky was a bloody orange over the eerily calm grey-blue water of the Pacific, the pollution that made Los Angeles's air so distasteful to breathe giving beautiful rich colors to the dying light. It made the seedy carnival and the water swollen, rotting planks of the run down pier look all the more eerie, all the more like the set of some B horror movie that wanted to - literally, in all ways - out gross all horror films of the previous year. There was a huge Ferris wheel that had been locked down and several outbuildings that must have once been food and game kiosks, and quite fittingly, there was a long, low slung building that still had vestiges of its haunted house sign. Logan had to cut through a chain link fence and a chain and padlock to get them inside, which took him all of five seconds.

"God, I hope there's no dead clowns here," Xander said quietly, as if this were a cemetery and not just an abandoned carnival. "Live ones are bad enough."

"I think we got bigger problems than It," Marc noted, shifting the rifle off his shoulder.

"It?" Matt wondered, looking around. "What it?"

"Stephen King reference, babe," Marc replied casually.

"Oh." Just from the look on his face, he guessed Matt hadn't read a lot of Stephen King.

"Even I got that reference," Xander told him. "Man, didn't they run the miniseries in Sweden?"

"Switzerland."

Xander made a face and waved his hand dismissively. "_Whatever_. Cold place with lots of blond people."

"I think you just described Minnesota," Naomi told him.

Xander rolled his eyes and sighed, giving up on the argument.

They all broke up, wandering off to different parts of the carnival. That was the other reason this pier was chosen over all others: places to get lost.

Gods could not technically be ambushed by lesser beings; they were far too aware of lessers in their midsts. But Degei felt he could swamp Erlik's senses with his power, hiding them until they attacked. How Degei planned to swamp him he didn't say. His 'mark' on them, the one that made them operatives under his aegis, were amongst the most simple and easily done Logan had ever seen. It was a serpentine mark, almost an S but with about three more bends in it, and Degei made it appear on them simply by touching them. There was a warm sensation, but it quickly passed. Logan had his mark on his forehead, so Helga didn't feel so alone with Moros's mark on her forehead - nearly everyone else had the marks on their arms or hands, save for Marc, who decided to be "total bad ass" and had Degei mark his neck.

You'd think a gun would be useless, but Helga had some enchanted bullets that she gave Marc. He only had six, but he figured a million wouldn't be enough if they didn't do any major damage. Helga wasn't sure what kind of damage they would do to Elrik; she figured they'd hurt him, but beyond that she couldn't confirm a kill, except perhaps in a corporeal form. She had brought her flamethrower, which had interesting supernatural marks on the tank. Did it make it supernatural fire, or was that Stansin graffiti?

Nearly everyone else had physical weapons that might not do any good at all, but gave them something to hold and reassure themselves with. Bren wore the mirror shield on his back and carried a crossbow; Naomi carried a sword; Xander had a long handled axe; Matt was carrying one of Marc's high powered pistols; Sid had a bandolier of throwing knives across his chest, and a much larger hunting knife in a sheath tied to his left upper thigh. (And Sid could throw a knife with fucking scary accuracy - he'd seen it. It was yet another obscure talent taught to the Royal Guards of Rahjan.) Wesley and Giles weren't with them yet, but it was unlikely they'd have weapons since they were using magic as their weapon, and Scott and the Ressiks hadn't arrived yet - they'd beat them here - but he doubted Scott would have a weapon, unless one of the Ressiks trusted him with a spare gun. Logan assumed both Angel and Kier would have swords, because that seemed to be a vampire type of weapon. Logan had none, unless you counted his claws, which he did, and which he always had with him.

As for Degei, well, he was their big gun, so he hardly needed anything. Except maybe pants. Admittedly, because he was made of snakes and only took on an approximation of a humanoid form, his naked form was as flat and featureless as a Barbie or Ken doll, but that in itself was kind of disturbing. At least Bob wore pants (or shorts, or, if worse came to worst, a Speedo, but he usually made some concession to Human modesty).

Logan stayed with Degei until the god found the approximate center of the carnival, an open expanse with abandoned game booths on one side and the rusted old Ferris wheel on the other. Logan ducked behind a booth, and watched as Degei hummed to himself, a noise like a chorus of electrical wires, slowly morphing into a chorus of snake's hisses. He spread his arms out slowly, lifting his flat face to the crimson rays of the setting sun, and Logan saw his skin looked like it was boiling.

No, wrong - not boiling; moving. Degei's skin was undulating like a sail in the breeze, and it was as mesmerizing as it was disgusting. He wondered if anyone else could see this, and guessed not, because they were so spread out along the pier, and he was Degei's only constant companion. It was because he was Bob's avatar that Degei seemed to trust him, and Logan didn't fool himself into thinking it was anything but that.

The hum/hiss reached a crescendo that Logan could feel reverberating along his bones, and then Degei seemed to explode in a thousand snakes, all of them flying outward and landing on the pier, thudding down on top of booths and stands like living rain, and none seemed the least bit hurt by this ordeal. Logan thought he saw some of them on the Ferris wheel too, but they must have been insanely large for him to see them from this distance.

A red striped black garter snake seemed to take up a wary position in front of him, looking out at the pier as if prepared to defend him against a threat, and Logan guessed this was how he was overwhelming Elrik's senses while also making himself known. There were thousands upon thousands of avatar snakes here; it was the god equivalent of turning the amplifiers up to eleven. This would be like a brick upside his head.

The sky had darkened, the wind off the water turning slightly cold, when Logan first heard the noise.

He thought it was all these snakes again, but the noise was too high pitched, a drone without variation. It became sharp and high, and his first thought was a swarm of bees. But as the moving black funnel cloud swept down on the pier, Logan realized they were flies; nearly a million flies, formed into a large, dark mass that soon became a vague humanoid shape on the pier.

"Does this mean he's the actual lord of the flies?" Logan whispered to the snake. It just looked at him with its ink dot eye, giving him no response at all.

What? It was a legitimate question. It felt like something they should have known going in.


	8. Chapter 8

As soon as bug boy became semi-solidified (unlike Degei and his snakes, the flies never totally cohered; you could see gaps, and the flies seemed to be constantly moving around an invisible point), he proclaimed, in a voice that sounded like the buzzing of a thousand bees, "Degei, why are you here?" It was the kind of voice that set your teeth on edge; it was like sound reverberating off tin foil.

A bunch of snakes coagulated on the pier, working into a man sized pile that soon became humanoid Degei again. Oddly enough, though, the amount of snakes scattered about seemed to be the same. "I could ask you the same thing," Degei replied, sounding normal. Did he have a god voice? That kind of scary, hard to listen to tone that Bob had? He assumed he must have, because if Bob had it, everyone must have. Erlik must have had one that could make you lose your lunch.

Erlik cocked his head, which looked funny considering the flies never stopped moving, and his neck looked only half formed. "This is my realm. I've claimed it."

"It's not; it's not mine either. We're trespassing. We should go."

"You first."

This was like kids on a playground. Logan scowled and wanted to comment, but kept his mouth shut. Where was Giles and Wesley? He was afraid that Degei was such a nice guy, so meek and mild, that he'd never start anything - he'd wait for Erlik to make the first move. What if his first move was killing him? How long would it take Degei to pop back up here?

Just as Logan was getting almost unbearably restless, Kier seemed to jump out of nowhere and swung a big ass sword, cutting Erlik in half at the waist … theoretically. The flies began to topple and instantly reformed, and by the time Kier got the sword up to his shoulder, Erlik was reformed, and Kier went flying through the air, hitting and demolishing an ancient ring toss stand. Another sword whistled through the air and sliced right though the center of Erlik, and somehow Degei's snakes loosened up just enough to let the sword pass through him without cutting him.

Angel stomped up the pier, and said angrily to Erlik, "What does it take for you to get the message you're not w -" That was as far as Angel got before he too was sent flying into another empty stand, which he hit with enough force to collapse the entire thing on top of him. It was a good thing they were vampires and under Degei's aegis, because that really must have hurt.

"You!" Erlik roared, facing (? Hard to tell when he was all flies) Degei. "They stink of your power! Why are you doing this?"

"I've already said, Erlik, you're just not listening. We don't belong here. It's not our place."

"How many lessers are here? How many have you converted?" The flies seemed to be agitated, as they were undulating like Degei's skin had been earlier.

Degei didn't answer. He just stood there, a statue made of snakeskin, as Erlik seemed to swell in size, more and more flies joining the pile.

Suddenly there was a thudding that shook the pier, a rhythmic pounding like something mechanical, and Erlik said, "They can't hide from them."

Logan risked a look past his booth, to see what was moving up the pier towards them.

His first thought was golems, but he knew that was incorrect. Still, what else did you call them? They were seven foot piles of dirt, mud, and sand, sculpted into rough humanoid forms, but totally without definition, much like Erlik himself. There were no eyes, no noses, nothing resembling a face or a feature; they were just plain hulks with thick torsos and thick arms and legs like tree trunks, standing in lines eight across. Logan guessed there were about two dozen. He couldn't imagine they were very strong, being made of dirt, but thinking about it, he changed his mind. They were made by a god, "molded" from the Earth - they were probably pretty tough, and certainly felt no pain. Since they weren't technically alive, they couldn't really be killed. Shit - they always got you on these technicalities.

He prepared to rush them, to plow into them (somewhat literally) and figure out on the go if he could beat them for any length of time, when he thought he heard an odd noise. He wasn't sure what it was, but then he heard … something. He looked out towards the ocean, and noticed that they were about to be hit by a tidal wave.

No, scratch that. The water wasn't a huge wave that was about to descend on them, but was continuing to swell upward, a ludicrous gravity defying tower of water that was probably about thirty feet high and still growing. How the hell -

_Aquaman. _Son of a bitch, Matt had just become useful.

If Erlik saw it - and he must have, because it was Degei who had his back to the water - he didn't react to it, and it occurred to Logan that no, he probably wouldn't. It wouldn't feel like god energy because it wasn't, and he didn't know how things worked in this dimension; for all he knew, this could be normal. He could sense no threat in Human power, because it wasn't a threat. To him.

To his mud people, well, that was another story.

Logan began to wonder if the kid was stuck, because the pillar of water was massive, and he'd never exactly done something like this before, had he? Then again, Sid had said he'd made the tide go out. The tide; an inexorable, natural process that involved the entirety of the ocean. Oh fuck, was the kid that powerful? Why hadn't they figured that out before? The world was what, seventy percent water? If he could control just a fraction of a single percentage point of it at once, that was still a massive amount of power. And they'd teased him for his lame power. Wow, they were all idiots.

Finally the pillar of water collapsed, but as directionally as an arrow. It rushed downward, hitting the pier with a thud that should have demolished it, and Degei suddenly exploded into a mass of water snakes before the head of the water funnel passed right through him and slammed into the startled Erlik so hard that his mass of flies disappeared beneath the torrent before it swamped over the dirt soldiers, not so much carrying them away as dissolving them, reducing them to silt as the water funnel sloshed over the far side of the pier, joining with the larger body of water once more. The water beneath them was roiling as if angry, churning in such a way that no matter his god powers, Erlik would be hard pressed to find enough grains of dirt to put them back together again.

The strangest thing about all of this was the water retained its pillar like shape throughout. Logan watched it surge past him like it was behind an invisible wall, and it never hit any of the stands; it was like the world's largest and most accurately named water snake.

Although Logan was fairly certain flies didn't like to get wet - it weighed down their wings - Erlik reformed with the water still swirling past his waist, and demanded angrily, "What was that?!"

Degei reformed too, his coloring now mostly uniform black thanks to him being mostly made of water snakes. "A reason to leave. This is your last chance."

Erlik made a noise that could have been a snort, or maybe a cough. It was sharp and short and guttural, the audio equivalent of a rabbit punch. "You're no threat to me, snake god. I can't be killed either, or have you forgotten, languishing in your little corner of nowhere? I don't even need this world - it needs me. It wants me here. Can't you feel it? There's lots of evil here, it's simply unfocused. I'm just here to channel it."

"I think Ulgan will have something to say about that."

At the mention of his name, the flies seemed to get agitated anew, breaking off from his main body to buzz around him and then settle into his shoulders, which looked like they were boiling. "By the time he figures things out, it'll be too late."

The water was all off the pier now, although the ocean continued to roil around the dock like an angry beast, pacing and waiting for a chance to strike again. Logan noted that neither he nor the garter snake had gotten wet.

"Freeze, motherfuckers!" A booming voice roared across the pier. The Ressiks had arrived.

The lizardy demons were all dressed to the nines in dark suits, like they fancied themselves a crew straight out of a Tarantino film, and all had shiny guns, mostly Glocks, with the ones in the back hefting large automatic weapons. Erlik looked back at them with what could have been disdain, but his vague, unformed face made it difficult to read his expression. "You pieces of shit. Do you think I'm afraid of you?"

A bronze Ressik, who presumably was the leader of them, snapped, "You should be." They then opened fire, a fusillade of bullets that ripped through the cloud of flies and avoided Degei altogether, although Logan wasn't sure how they managed that. It must have been something Degei was doing.

The cloud of flies reformed (barely), and he waved his hand towards the Ressiks, who suddenly dissolved. It was so startling that Logan wasn't sure what he saw at first; it was like they burned up in a microsecond, flesh and bone turned into ash, so rapidly that they never lost their shapes until they were all burned away. The wind blew and they disappeared into sooty clouds, the guns not burnt away hitting the pier with metallic clunks. So much for the god killers; there was a waste of a few thousand dollars. For Helga's sake, he hoped it was the type Bob conjured up out of thin air.

Erlik faced Degei again, and it looked like he had a scowl that was slicing his poorly made face in half. "Are you done?" he wondered sourly.

Degei didn't respond. He didn't have to - what was there to say to that?

An animated dead man started walking up the pier.

Logan thought for a moment that it was Scott, as the build and height were similar, but this man was white and bald, and wore stained jeans, dirty Timberlands, and a torn t-shirt advertising a Mexican strip club. He had a pentagram drawn into his forehead, making him look a bit like a Manson family member out for a stroll. Logan thought the pentagram was drawn on his forehead in something black - ink, charcoal - but he picked up a burnt flesh scent from him, and he realized it had been burned into his skin. Good thing he was already dead.

"What pathetic annoyance is this?" Erlik demanded.

Degei rolled his shoulders in a partial shrug. "Isn't he one of yours?"

He thought Erlik might turn him to ash too, but suddenly one of Degei's snakes ate one of Erlik's flies, and he spun back around. "Are you challenging me, snake lord? "

"No, they're just getting hungry."

Was that Degei being funny again? He was so deadpan it was hard to say.

The Human with the pentagram burned into his forehead paused within arm's reach of Erlik, but didn't move any further. Erlik faced him, but without much worry. Flies buzzed around the dead man, but he was probably used to that.

Erlik stared at him, as far as Logan could tell. (He didn't exactly have regular eyes.) "You smell of dark magic," Erlik accused the dead man. "You're not one of mine."

Logan had to suppress the urge to sigh and say, _"Finally." _He'd been getting impatient and his butt was getting numb, his claws itching to get out. But he remained holding them back, because he wanted to hold them until the last second. They were a surprise.

The corpse just stood there, slightly unsteady on its feet, not responding. But it wouldn't. It was merely a meat puppet, a sleeve of flesh - a prison in waiting.

An arm reached through the corpse's chest, and grabbed Erlik's arm. It was pretty shocking, not only because it was a slightly translucent arm reaching bloodlessly through another person's torso, but because the hand had grabbed Erlik like he was solid, like he wasn't made of loosely gathered flies.

But that was the thing. Ghosts couldn't pass through gods; gods to them were solid things, even when they weren't, even when they were a loose conglomeration of insects.

Normal people usually scattered the seeds of their own downfall, and whether it was some unconscious need to get caught or just carelessness it didn't matter. People usually defeated themselves, and thankfully, it seemed that gods were no different.

The only thing that could possibly kill Erlik on this plane was a ghost, and the stupid evil bastard had filled all of Los Angeles with them. Including a Watcher with a tiny bit of a grudge.

The stupid bastard. Logan almost felt sorry for him.


	9. Chapter 9

Wesley's hand might not have been technically corporeal, but it still looked like it was burning where he grabbed Erlik, and he was shouting something, words with too many consonants and syllables. Giles was shouting them as well, and he appeared to step out of thin air as his invisibility spell dropped away. Wesley then yanked Erlik forward as his intangible form appeared to rear out of the corpse, breaking off from it in some bizarre humanoid form of cellular division, as Erlik was dragged into the corpse. But as Wesley stepped back, Erlik didn't emerge.

"Now," Wesley shouted, getting some distance from the body now trapping Erlik. Ghost or not, he was holding his burned hand to his chest like it hurt.

A half dozen throwing knives came out of nowhere and stuck in the corpse's back, while a crossbow arrow thunked into its chest from the front. The corpse staggered under impact and shock, and as its mouth opened, a couple of flies drifted lazily out. "What sorcery is this?" Erlik croaked from inside his fleshie prison.

Logan charged out from his hiding place as Angel emerged from the wreckage, pulling out a second sword, and Helga came out with her flamethrower. A shot rang out, and half of Elrik's new head exploded in a cloud of gore, leaving him with a large, ragged hole where his right temple used to be. It would have been an instant kill shot on anyone but a god.

Degei had stepped back to make room for the dismemberment. "The Humans are a lot more resourceful than you've credited them with. You're not the first god they've killed."

As if to emphasize that fact, Marc put another round in Erlik, this time blowing a grapefruit sized hole in the middle of his torso, kill shot number two. Bren put another crossbow bolt through his throat, and a knife embedded itself in the back of his skull. As Logan and Angel approached him - Logan in front, Angel from behind - Erlik made a negative noise and roared, "I am still your better! You cannot harm me!"

Even though there was no way he could have seen behind himself now, he reached behind him and grabbed the sword as Angel attempted to plunge it into the small of his back. Logan had pulled back his fist to take off his head, but before he could even complete the punch, Erlik rammed the corpse's hand into his chest. It hurt like hell, and he probably meant to grab his heart, but funnily enough he heard the corpse's fingers snap against his adamantium coated ribs. "What is this?" Erlik shouted angrily, like he'd just coated his bones in metal to piss him off. Hand still in his chest, Erlik flicked him away like an insect, and he slammed into the booth he'd been hiding behind. With all the metal in him, it didn't so much collapse as vaporize.

Logan's chest burned where Erlik had ripped a hole in it, and black spots danced before his eyes. He'd had worse injuries, but possibly because it was inflicted by a god of evil, his consciousness wavered. He heard Giles yell, "He has to be totally destroyed! He can regenerate from a big enough part!" There were two gunshots in close succession, and Erlik made another noise of disbelief and disgust. There was a fwoosh that could only have been the flamethrower, followed by a scream not so much of pain but of rage.

Logan suddenly felt energy fill him, blue light filling his vision and coursing through his veins like liquefied sunlight, and he was momentarily confused. Bob hadn't left any power in him; he'd removed it all like he asked. Son of a bitch - the bastard was watching. Bob had been monitoring the situation through him all this time. "You sneaky fucker," he growled, as he climbed out of the wreckage. The noxious smell of burnt, dead flesh made him recoil instinctively, but he forced himself onward.

Erlik had been well baked, his body perforated with about a dozen holes, and as Logan watched Angel hacked off one of his arms with his sword. Erlik screamed and grabbed Angel by the throat with his remaining hand, kicking the sword out of his grip. Logan charged Erlik, popping his claws as Erlik turned to face him, and he rammed them both through the corpse's face, yanking them apart, sending two halves of his head flying in different directions. The body remained standing, though.

"Yeouch," Xander commented. "I don't think that's what they mean by a facelift."

Logan then sliced his neck off, sending the remaining lower half of his face flying, and then chopped off his other arm. Still, the corpse remained standing. "Stand back," Helga ordered. "Let us finish up."

Although he wanted to keep dicing him until he could be used in a salad, he got a hold of his anger and stepped back, so Naomi, Angel, and Xander could continue chopping him down. Helga baked some pieces with her flamethrower, while Kier minced some others. Erlik hadn't made a noise since Logan had bifurcated his head, and he wasn't making any more now.

Angel eventually came up to him, and said, "Do you know your eyes are glowing blue?"

"I guessed," he admitted, since he was still seeing the world through a blue filter. He looked down at his chest wound, but saw it was already healed. Not really a shock. Logan still had his claws out, and he thought they had a slight blue aura about them, but he honestly couldn't tell since he was seeing everything blue. He retracted them, though, because he didn't need them anymore.

"I thought Bob took all his power out of you."

"So did I."

Angel raised an eyebrow at that. "I'm talking to you now, right?"

"I ain't Bob," he reassured him, as Helga burned Erlik's body to ashy remnants. The bones wouldn't burn, but Kier, Sid, and Giles stamped on them, reducing them to shards.

"But he knows."

"He must, the fucker."

Logan finally noticed Scott standing near Giles, holding one of the guns the Ressiks had been using. It was possible that he put a shot or two in Erlik; he'd probably joined the fight when he was down. Matt and Marc had appeared, both holding weapons, but they were aimed down at the pier. "Good job, kid," Logan said. It took him a moment to realize he'd said it in Swiss German.

Matt looked at him, startled. "Uh, thank you."

"The X-Men could teach you how to channel that power," Scott added, forever doing recruitment pitches.

Matt shrugged. "I think I'm too old for school."

"Is he really dead?" Xander asked, hefting his axe to his shoulder. Considering that all that was left of Erlik was a charcoal smear and shattered bones, you'd think the answer was obvious.

Degei nodded in that odd way of his. "In a sense. He's back in Ulgan's realm, and I image Ulgan will not be pleased."

"We're still here," Wesley said, jerking his head in Scott's direction. "Why is that?"

"It took a lot of power to open the realms of the dead. The effects should fade within hours."

"Oh thank Medusa I didn't have to use this thing," Bren said, adjusting the mirror shield on his back. "I really wasn't sure I could, and holy shit! Logan, are you Bob?"

Now everybody was looking at him, and he groaned at the attention. "No, I'm me, it's just Bob gave me a power up after Elrik tried to rip my heart out. I think he's been eavesdropping this entire time, the sneaky fuck."

"Isn't that just like Bob, to hide until the last possible second and then show up," Wesley said, shaking his head. It looked like his right hand had been burned off, the arm ended in a charred stump, but how was that possible? He was a ghost. Then again, grabbing a god probably did have some consequences, even to the spectral.

"He's gotta drama queen thing goin' on," Logan agreed.

"Tell me about it," Helga concurred, shaking a few drops of fuel from the ignition hose of her flamethrower.

There was an odd noise, like a rattlesnake constantly getting stuck mid rattle, and they all slowly realized that it was Degei laughing. When they were all staring at him, Degei looked at Logan and said, "Leave it to Bob to select an avatar as impudent as he is."

"I am not impudent," Logan objected. Suddenly everyone was staring at him with great dubiousness. "What? I wouldn't use _that_ word."

"So we saved the world?" Matt asked, sounding a little puzzled.

"Yep, that's it," Xander said cheerfully. "Once you reduce the bad guy to pate, you usually call it a win. There are exceptions, of course, but if you can scrape 'em off your shoes, it's all good."

Matt now looked puzzled, and glanced at Marc for help. "He's pretending to be blasé about it," Marc told him. "But I think god killin' never gets old."

"Hey, this isn't the first god I've killed," Xander insisted. After a look from Giles, he added, "Helped kill."

"It's hardly our first either," Logan said, nodding to both Angel and Helga. "Makes you wonder what'd happen if the gods got word we were all bona fide god killers."

"They'd kill you all in your sleep," Degei said. After a moment, he added, "Don't worry, I won't tell them."

Oh good, yet another thing to worry about.

There was some discussion about whether they should hose off Erlik's remains or not, and Kier tried to convince Bren they should go check out the Ferris wheel while they were still here, which kept up until Bren threatened to stake him, and seemingly everything was back to normal.

But it wasn't, not really. Bob had some questions to answer, but sadly he wasn't here to do it. So he had to go to him, and there was only one way he knew how to do that.

Once they got back to the office, he told Angel what he needed, and he let him have his office. It was certainly dark enough, and while Angel's couch wasn't wildly comfortable, it'd do. Logan closed his eyes and focused on all this blue, seeing it as a trail, something that could lead him back to its source.

He had no idea how long it took, how long he followed the energy, but there was a disorienting sensation of falling, and then suddenly he was standiing on the deck of a patio overlooking Sydney Harbor. It was a nice day, the sky a clear, high blue, the water a darker shade, seabirds wheeling over head. "Wanna beer, or is that a silly question?" Bob asked.

He turned to find him sitting on the edge of a picnic table, wearing loud, palm tree patterned surfer shorts and a loose blue tank top. He looked completely relaxed and tanned, his hair longer and streaked through with sunny blond highlights.

Logan didn't think, he just acted; the only way he could ever beat telepaths and guys like Bob was by acting without thinking. Luckily he'd had loads of practice at this.

He lunged across the distance between them and grabbed Bob by the throat, slamming him up against the glass screen door seperating the patio from the rest of the house. Much to his annoyance, Bob didn't look surprised or irritated; in fact, he seemed to have been expecting it.

"Is there a problem?" he asked, still casual.

Logan growled, resisting the urge to put him through the door. The worst part of all of this was he knew Bob was letting him do this - at any time, he could put a stop to this. But he was essentially humoring him at this point, and that just made him angrier. "You coldn't tell us you were in on this?"

"I sent messages, mate!" he protested. "Is it my fault you missed 'em?"

"How did you send messages?"

"My usual way."

He was about to ask for further clarification and see if he could indeed put Bob through the door, when Logan suddenly got it: music. "The jukebox," he groaned.

"There ya go. You really think it's random?"

"How the fuck were we supposed to make sense of that?" He complained. "Could you pick more obscure and weird songs?"

"But that was it! The weird songs were a dead giveaway. Who has Mr. Bungle on a jukebox? And not just any song of theirs either." He then quoted a bit. "_'May your sky roll up like a scroll, may your seas fill with blood'_. I was trying to pump up the team."

Logan shook his head and reluctantly let go of his throat. Again, it didn't matter, because he couldn't hurt him anyways. "This is insane. Where the fuck are you?"

"Still in Bast's dimension. I guess you heard about the god dust up from Moros, right? We're gettin' it calmed down; the power hungry always bite off more than they can chew. Problem is, from your perspective, time runs pretty slow here. As far as I'm concerned, it's been weeks."

"It's been almost a year!"

"Yeah, I gathered that." He then took a swig of his beer, and Logan belatedly realized he'd never lost it, not even when he grabbed him by the throat. That was a little disheartening. "Want one?" He held up the beer can and swirled the liquid within; Logan could hear the beer sloshing against the sides.

Logan collapsed back on the table's built in bench seat. "Yeah, why the hell not?" Not surprisingly, he found a beer can sitting on the table, not far from his elbow. He grabbed it and cracked it open, taking a healthy swig. It tasted very good, but then it should have. "So why not tell us you were watching us?"

Bob sat on the opposite side of the table and shrugged. "Erlik coulda read it in your mind, and I didn't want to spoil the surprise. Boy, when he figured out you were my avatar, he knew he was fucked."

"He's not coming back."

"Hell no. Not unless Ulgan wants me invading his dimension, and trust me, he doesn't."

Logan took another drink of his beer, and wondered if he could do this. He had no choice really - he had to know. "Did you know about Jean?"

He shook his head. "No, I swear I didn't. I didn't even know she was alive."

Should he believe him? Bob seemed to be as on the level as he ever got, but he still didn't trust him. How could he? He was the self-confessed god of lies and liars; it was his bread and butter. "Was Camaxtli still in her?"

Bob sighed heavily and glanced out at the big hulking Pope's hat of the Sydney Opera House. Technically the view was all wrong, but it could be since this was just a mindscape. Anything was possible here. "I wouldn't think so. When the Powers That Be decide to get rid of you, you're usually gone. But … he was a sneaky bastard. If anyone could have found a way around it, it would be him."

"So he could have?"

Bob nodded wearily. "He could have, but most likely in a vestigial form."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning it would be power without form, with nothing in the form of intelligence. It would be scattered, inchoate."

"Brain dead power?"

"Not quite, but it'd have little remembrance of its former self."

He nodded, easily seeing how that could explain Jean when she came back. "Is that what happened? Was it actually Jean that came back, or Camaxtli?"

Bob took another drink of his beer, clearly stalling. "Honestly? I don't know. You'd have to tell me."

"If she was really Camaxtli, I couldn't have -" he trailed off, not sure he wanted to say it.

As it was, he didn't have to; Bob knew what he meant. "Yes you could have, mate. Power without proper channeling is meaningless. Besides, I didn't exactly take all my power out of you - okay, so I lied, you can't tell me you're shocked - and you keep knocking Jean outta the equation. She might have been overwhelmed by Cammy's energy, but it doesn't mean she was completely burned through. She may have wanted the power initially, but no one ever realizes the price you pay for it. I mean, did no one pay attention to the Twilight Zone? The warnings were out there if she only listened."

Bob was basically saying that Jean saw dying as a way out. It didn't make him feel better. "But if she had some god energy in her, she's not really dead, is she? It doesn't matter if I had some of your energy or not, I'm not a god, and I couldn't have done it permanently. Right?"

He grimaced and sloshed his beer around the can again, and if Logan heard it right, the liquid level hadn't dropped one iota. "That's actually kinda hard to say. Camaxtli has no dimension to return to; it collapsed in itself and no longer exists."

"But Jean's dimension still exists."

"That it does. But if Cammy gets too high profile, the Powers will notice, and he can't want that, no matter how brain damaged his power is."

"So she could still be alive, but we may never know."

"Correct. Cammy could hide, and he/she still has friends in higher and lower places."

Logan sighed and hid his face in his hands, so Bob couldn't see his expression. Since he was probably reading his mind, he didn't know why he bothered. "I don't wanna keep killin' her. I don't give a fuck that I'm your avatar, I'm not doin' that again."

"I totally understand." He paused briefly, letting Logan have a moment, then said, "I hate to do this to ya, mate, but we may have another crisis in the works."

Logan dry washed his face, scrubbing away an errant tear, and faced Bob again, scowling. "What the fuck now?"

"It's Bren."

That honestly shocked him. "What? What about him?"

"He's on the verge of being the first Human - okay, half-Human, but it's a minor distinction - chosen of the Gorgons, and that's a big fucking deal."

"Since when? And what do you mean "chosen"?"

Bob sighed and sat back, his expression unusually serious. He wasn't kidding. "See, that's been the brilliance of Rags. He's a Persaid, so he's automatically dismissed as harmless and negligible by everyone, and he's also a tragic alcoholic, so that just adds to his dismissed status. But he _is_ actually the chosen of the Gorgons, which means he actually has great power at his disposal. He's never been the type to use it, though, because he understands that you don't take something like that casually. You know his tattoos?"

"The black vines crawling up his arms? Yeah."

"Those aren't tattoos. Those are marks."

Logan was about to point out that tattoos were marks, or at least a form of them, but Bob was too grim for him to be a smart ass. "Marks of what?"

"It's a promise in flesh, left by the Gorgons on their chosen. It means "Touch, harm, defile this, answer to the Gorgons". No sane being wants that, because holy fucking sheep shit, those gals _mean_ it. They're about the only non-absentee gods left, whether people realize it or not. And they're Elite too; they can kill other gods."

"You?"

"If I'm stupid enough to piss 'em off, yeah. But Euryale has a bit of a crush on me, so I figure I'm safe as long as I don't marry her. So you get what I'm sayin' here? They're wicked powerful; their chosen will be wicked powerful."

"But it's Rags. How does the kid come into this?" In one sense, the idea of Rags wielding massive power was hilarious, because yes, he was the demon version of Charles Bukowski, only without a writing career and with an impenetrable Cockney accent, as well as a best bud who was a pile of sentient slime. But then again, after the whole thing in Toronto, he could kind of see Rags being powerful; the vampires couldn't even touch him. They were scared of him once they realized he wasn't just a Persaid demon - fuck, _Dru_ was scared of him, and that said volumes. So he was a powerful man with no ambition, or conversely, a man who actually understood that power was to be used judiciously, not thrown around in apocalyptic fits (perhaps Magneto and Jean/Camaxtli could have learned something from him).

"I think Rags knows he just can't keep this up; his lifestyle isn't conducive to his health, to say the least."

"Having an IV full of Long Island ice tea'll do that to a person."

"Won't it just?" Bob ran a hand through his hair, and yet it didn't appear to be messed up. "So Bren's in line, and that's just bad news."

"For Bren?"

"Yes, but probably not the way you're thinking. He won't get Jean power levels or anything; it doesn't work like that. He won't change … technically."

"He'll just have gods on his shoulders."

"Too right. He'll be protected, and he can call down the moon. And there are some people who ain't gonna like that, especially if it's a Human who gets that."

Logan had a pleasant mental image of some slimy, intolerant televangelist being confronted by mutant Bren, his female gods, and his gay vampire lover, but as nice an idea as that was, that wasn't what Bob meant. If only he did. "Are we talking other gods? Demons?"

"The Senior Partners."

"Wolfram and Hart?" He had to admit, he was pretty confused here. "I don't get it. They don't give a shit about Rags."

"Because he's a Persaid demon, and he lives over a taco stand. They don't take him seriously, even though they know they should. Bren will be a different story, _and_ he's working with Angel. Now the stakes have turned unbelievably ugly. They'll feel hard pressed to make sure Bren is out of the way."

"So what do we do? Ask Rags to pick someone else?"

"Rags didn't pick him."

Oh damn it. And it made so much sense to think that Rags had picked him in an effort to give him a weapon he could use against Kier if someone figured out a way to replace his vampire with Vestus. "You couldn't ask the Gorgons to find someone else?"

Bob raised an eyebrow at him. "Uh huh. How successful have you been in telling very dangerous women that they can't have what they want?"

He grunted an acknowledgement. That usually didn't work. "So what do we do? Tell Rags to speed up his training?"

Bob shook his head. "As I said, power without proper channeling is useless. Rags will teach Bren what he can do before he lets him have the power; I trust him to do that, and we shouldn't force it. Besides, becoming the chosen doesn't mean he can't be killed; all it means is his death will be instantly avenged."

"So the Sisters get Biblical on the assassin's asses? Why would anyone be suicidal enough to risk that?"

"Because a god or demon could convince them they need to, or some shit like that. Look at Wolfram and Hart - they have entire floors made up of nothing but cannon fodder. And if these people are at all smart, they'll use middle men, so the Gorgons never trace it back to them. Even the Senior Partners don't wanna start shit with them."

Logan scratched his head. "So Bren's a target?"

"Absolutely. You need to talk to him and talk to Angel. We need to start planning, and we need to do it now. A Human being the chosen of the Gorgons is a provocative act. Not to the Gorgons, mind you, they don't think anything about it, but then again, they've always had one eye on humanity. It's humanity that's forgotten them, not vice versa."

"Yeah, okay, that's what I'm not getting: a Human chosen bein' a big deal. Why?"


	10. Chapter 10

Bob sighed, shaking his head faintly. "You're gonna make me say it, aren't ya?"

Logan raised an eyebrow at him. "Apparently."

"Humans are not … most gods see Humans as …"

Since he was struggling so hard, Logan decided to help him out. "Pets?"

"Nuisances. We're never supposed to take you seriously as anything."

"You've married some."

"And you wonder why the gods don't like me?" Bob made a vague hand gesture, but quickly stopped. "There are gods who will see this as setting a horrible precedent, giving Humans a level of legitimacy they don't deserve. By making him a chosen, it makes Bren the equivalent of a gods' messenger, and that just isn't done. It'd be like making a gerbil your guard dog."

"Gee, how flattering. Wait 'til Bren hears that."

"It isn't a personal judgment. I'm just saying that that's how the other gods will react to this. They're not gonna like it; some will scheme to make sure he isn't a chosen, or isn't for long. But in a crafty way so they never have to face the Gorgons."

"So he's fucked?"

"No. I expect most to give up after the first failure, when the Gorgons go nuclear on someone's ass. But the Senior Partners are not so easily discouraged."

Logan slumped down on the table, resting his head on his folded arms. There was nothing like going from one impossible battle straight into another. "Can't you blow them up or something?"

"You know I can't start shit with the Partners. The whole Powers/Partners détente." Bob patted his head like he was a needy dog, which was supremely annoying, but made him look up, which was what Bob was aiming for. "If they cross a line, I can respond. But they're usually sneakier than that. They usually set it up so it looks like I'm the one breaking the pact."

Logan sat up so he could gulp the rest of his beer down in one go, and then balled the can up and tossed it aside, not caring where it landed. Again, mindscape, didn't matter. "So how the fuck do we do this?"

"Well … that's why I figured we needed a brainstorming session."

"Holy shit. The poor kid."

"He's got some good friends, though. He aligned himself with some real ass kickers."

He couldn't deny that. But he had to admire Bob's ability to distract him from certain topics, as there was something he wanted to bring up that he hadn't. He also admired his ability to manifest beer, as there was another can right beside him. "Was Xavier always that much of a putz? Was that story about rearranging Jean's mind true?"

Bob was not thrown by the dramatic subject change; he didn't seem to be thrown by anything. "I can't say, as I avoided gettin' too close to him so I didn't make his brains blow up. But, c'mon, you don't think he made all his money without using his telepathy? Hell, I didn't make all my money without using my powers, namely 'cause I can't _not_ read people. I think everyone, no matter how virtuous they seem or package themselves, have something dark in them. Just because they disdain it doesn't mean they won't do it, given the right circumstances. He probably thought he was doing the right thing; you know how that paves the way to hell. The guy who shot Franz Ferdinand probably thought that was a good idea at the time."

"You don't need to tell me people are hypocrites, 'cause I know that. I just thought … the way Scott seemed to revere him, I figured …"

"He was better than you. He was better than all of you," Bob said, finishing the thought that was in his head. Having it voiced made it sound even more stupid and childish than it had in his head. But Bob reached across the table and patted his arm, giving him a look of empathy. "It's nice to think that there are people out there who aren't as flawed as the rest of us. It's why people believed in gods long after gods stopped believing in them. It's nice to think there's someone out there who has all their shit together. But it's not true; we're all fucked up in our own special ways. Some much, much more than others."

"Like me."

"Don't cop to that, mate. A lot of that was done _to _you, which makes you partially exempt. You have to be pretty fuckin' low to blame a victim for their own mind rape."

That description made Logan wince. He never liked casting himself in the role of victim. "Maybe that's why Jeannie liked me, huh? We'd both had our heads redecorated, only she didn't know, and too many people had made a wreck of mine."

Bob shrugged, then gave him a toothy grin, which pretty much meant a smart remark of some sort was incoming. "Oh come on, mate, yer a big stud. Hell, _I'm _attracted to you. You got the whole handsome, misunderstood, dark brooding man of mystery thing goin' on. It's pretty irresistible."

He glared at him. "Marc has already staked out this joke territory."

"Damn it! We need to coordinate."

A warm but gentle breeze blew, and Logan looked up and watched the seabirds ride the drafts, envying them their freedom. Or he would have, if this wasn't a mindscape. It was just so detailed and pleasant, it was easy to forget.

In retrospect, though, it shouldn't have been. Life was quite rarely this peaceful and neat.

* * *

The woman who called herself Ana Dyne - in reality, Kiki Melendez - slouched in the chair across from his desk, looking like she had some kind of Berellian brain sucker consuming the top of her skull. In truth, it was just her hair, some kind of dreadful dreadlocks thing dyed in a rainbow of candy colored hues. He didn't think she was ever a very attractive woman, but now she just seemed to be going out of her way to look unappealing.

David was not impressed by what she'd told him, and he supposed she knew he wouldn't be. Mr. Giles was a better spellcaster than anticipated, although he didn't pick up that she was deliberating downplaying her own necromancing abilities when they were first attacked. Angel was a known quantity, of course, but the worst news of all was that even though he wasn't the chosen yet, the Chambers boy seemed able to take care of himself. Even when Angel was kept busy by the dead, Brendan managed not to get himself killed. "He snapped one of their necks like a bottle cap," Ana reported, making a motion with her hands that looked like tearing a newspaper, not breaking someone's neck, but he wasn't about to correct her. He wanted her out of his office as soon as possible. "Oh, and then there were all these other people back at their office. This ghost guy, a cute Arab guy, this guy with sideburns, and this black guy who wore welding goggles for no obvious reason and his pretty blonde boyfriend who was, I dunno, Swedish or something. And this Hispanic guy that everyone called Scott, and then there was this green chick -"

"We think we know the players," he interrupted impatiently. The man with sideburns had to be Logan, which was always bad news, and the Arab must have been Saddiq, the mutant boy, while the black man had to be Marcus - none of that was good. The ghost, the Hispanic man, and the Swedish one were unknowns, but hopefully just death manifestations that would fade. The green chick could only be Helga, whose picture you could find in the dictionary beside the definition "Crazy Bitch". But at least she went back to her bar. Logan, Marcus, and Saddiq had no rhyme or reason to their movements; they could stick around for a while, or they could go away as soon as the threat passed. It was almost impossible to say. They'd probably be protective of Chambers to some degree - Logan and Saddiq considered him a "friend", and Marcus would probably have some sense of solidarity with a fellow gay mutant, or at least with Logan. At least Bob wasn't here, or they'd be well and truly fucked. He'd know what they were up to, and warn the others.

A problem, but one that had been foreseen, hence the test. They had to know how vulnerable Chambers was before the thing was done, and while it was assumed that teaming up with Angel and acquiring the would be Ascendant as a boyfriend put him in a very safe position, there was a possibility that, on his own, he was pretty helpless. That apparently wasn't true. It made sense, though - would the Gorgons have chosen a total pansy?

"So what, is that all you need?" Ana asked impatiently. She was itching to go, which was fine, as he was itching to get her out of here.

"Yes. I'll call you if we need any more," he said, sliding an envelope full of cash across the desk towards her. She snatched it up as if afraid it might disappear, and had the gall to actually count the money. Once she was satisfied, she nodded and got out of the chair.

"Nice doin' business with ya," she said insincerely, standing up and heading out the door. If it seemed odd for such an obscure figure to be leaving an agent's office, it still wouldn't raise any eyebrows - after all, this was L.A., and even the most talentless and misguided often tried to curry favors with high powered agents such as himself.

He turned in his chair and looked out his window, which had a good view of downtown, only partially blocked by skyscrapers. The sky was a strange color, half orange and half sienna, that he'd come to call the Los Angeles fug. He was more accustomed to seeing it at night, but it could happen in the morning, such as now. It wasn't a very good sign when it did, although he wasn't superstitious, just experienced.

He clipped his phone back on his ear and punched in the number that only he had. It connected him to a middleman who did business with Wolfram and Hart. He didn't know his name, just his voice over the phone, which is precisely how this man knew him. It was just another layer of security, another way of protecting themselves if things went wrong. They didn't have a lot of time, but it was unknown how much of a window they actually had - no one knew where Bob was or when he'd be back, but he could protect Chambers if it came to that or simply expose them, and that just wouldn't do.

In a way, it made perfect sense. His old boss said that all the "fruits and nuts" of society eventually ended up in Los Angeles, so why not a fallen god? He just had never quite pictured Lucifer as Australian or, quite frankly, so goddamn goofy. Gods were supposed to be dignified. Was that why he was kicked out of the kingdom? It would explain a lot.

David reported how Ana's test had gone, and the disappointing results, as well as the slightly discouraging intell. They had to watch Angel's office to see if Logan and Marcus moved on, but that would be difficult, as Logan and Marcus were both paranoid, and both had extra-sensory perceptions that seemed to clue them in to shifting playing fields. Logan had those mutant senses - smell was confirmed, but there was still some debate on how sensitive his hearing and vision were, if they were above Human norms or not. Marcus saw in infrared, which could make many forms of infiltration off limits. Combined with Angel's sense of the supernatural, this didn't leave many avenues open to them.

But they weren't out of play just yet. There were some options, just rather … extreme ones.

He watched the sun starting to break through the fug over the city as he confirmed that they were going to plan c.

The Chambers boy had to be dead within the next seventy two hours, or they were going to die for nothing. As his father always said, if you're going to gamble, you might as well go big.

8

At the end, it all came down to a waiting game, although a truly odd one in waiting for the dead to go away. But if the living thought it was odd, Wesley wondered if they knew how bad it was for the dead.

They went to the Way Station and drank most of their troubles away. Apparently there was something going wrong, according to Bob, but Logan had only told Angel, Bren, Kier, and Giles - and him, of course, but only because there was no way for them to keep him out. The one good thing about being a ghost was there was virtually no way to block your passage. Oh, to be honest he knew of a couple, but it was unlikely any of them would bother to try them.

Wesley wasn't shocked that some other gods were perturbed by Brendan's pending future as the Gorgon's chosen - nor was he surprised that the Gorgons were oblivious to the message that such an act would send - but Bren had apparently never grasped the significance of this, and now that he had he wanted out. But there was no way out, and besides, the Gorgons must have had their reasons for picking him. Bren pointed out that Kier had evaded his destiny, so why couldn't he evade his, but Logan pointed out that Kier evaded his mainly because it depended on other vampires being aware of an obscure vampire death cult, and considering he was changed by a '70's B-list actress, how likely was that? Bren had no comeback for that; Kier mentioned he didn't really like being known as the spawn of a B-list actress vampire, but conceded there were worse things.

Bren was not in a good mood. They decided to get together tomorrow for a "strategy meeting" to try and work out some plan to protect Bren until he could assume the mantel of the chosen, and then they'd have to change their strategy. Bren really didn't like being spoken of as an object that needed protecting, and he and Kier sat at a back table, far from everyone, Kier trying to reassure Bren that anyone after him would have to go through him first. Since Kier was supposed to be the Ascendant that was actually a good deal, but Wesley didn't blame him for not being too calmed by that. After all, who wanted to find out a bunch of gods just might want to kill you for something that wasn't your fault?

Wesley wished he could have a beer, but ghosts didn't drink. Considering ghosts weren't supposed to lose body parts and he had, he thought it would only be fair if he did get a drink. But who said life was fair? He just stared at his stump of a right wrist, and wondered if he ever came back as a ghost again, would he have the hand or not? It would be an interesting experiment, he supposed, but he doubted he could talk Giles into conjuring him up just for that purpose.

Giles talked to him for a while, but Wesley tired of what he sensed was a bit of pity. He didn't require it or want it, and Wesley just wasn't interested in wasting the time he had left this way. He talked to Angel for a while, although he wasn't interested in Angel's apology. It turned out no one knew what had happened to Illyria, although Bob theorized that she had carved herself out a piece of the Senior Partner's dimension, and they were content to leave her there rather than try to evict her. He didn't know if he should say "good for her" or not, so he just left it alone. He wished he knew what had happened to Fred, if she had found an afterlife or not, but there was no one here he could ask.

Logan and Scott sat at one end of the bar, talking and drinking. They seemed to come to some understanding, and Logan convinced Scott that Bob had told him it was Camaxtli not Jean that had killed him. Wesley got the feeling Logan was lying to make Scott feel better, and he also had the feeling that Scott knew it, but he accepted it anyways. Sometimes the lie was just better than the truth.

It was Scott who went first. He suddenly turned on his stool, and he started to say something, but then his body just pitched forward. Logan grabbed him long before he could hit the floor - sometimes the speed of his reflexes were astonishing - but even as Logan caught him, he looked across the room at Angel and Giles, and said, "He's dead."

"Well, duh," Xander said. He had put away enough beer that Wesley was shocked. When did Xander become a drinker? Naomi had mentioned something to him about that, saying that he'd retreated into alcohol after losing his eye and Anya … but he had two eyes, so Wesley didn't get that part of it.

"No, I mean he's gone," Logan snarled at him, laying Scott's body down on the floor. "It's just a corpse again. I'm smellin' decomposition."

Xander slammed down his beer glass. "Well, TMI Mr. Bloodhound."

Xander's carping aside, the corpse Scott had just inhabited had gone back to being a corpse, with no hitchhiker or anything. Now everybody was looking at him, as if expecting him to pop out of existence that very second. Wesley gave them a sarcastic look in return, but he honestly didn't know what was going to happen or when. Would it be like the first time, just falling abruptly into empty darkness? Truth be told, he'd rather have not gone, but he had no choice in the matter.

Logan caught his eye, and said, "I told Bob about you."

That caught him up short. "What? What did you say?"

But he never got an answer. It was like a dark lead curtain had slammed down, a black void suddenly rearing up and swallowing him whole.

For a moment.

He was still thinking, which Wesley knew was wrong. He had no sense of being before, he had no nothing, so the fact that he was still thinking struck him as wrong. Things got even more wrong as he felt something solid beneath him, and sat up, only to find himself on a park bench beneath a large oak tree. It was a mild day, with a light mist of rain in the air, and while the place looked vaguely familiar, he wasn't sure where he was. Or how or why.

"You're very lucky the Powers like selfless behavior, even if they aren't fond of using it themselves," Bob said, sitting on the other end of the bench. He was bundled up in a fleece lined leather jacket, but his leather pants didn't appear to be equally lined. "You helped expel Erlik. Which, by the way, is a hilarious name, but he never gets the joke. No sense of humor, that one. _'Ooh, look at me, I'm evil'_. Yeah, whatever. Tell it to the Girl Scouts."

He looked around, and figured out he wasn't in a park, just on the grounds of an estate that looked like a park. The emerald green lawn rolled towards the horizon, broken up by large, old trees and occasional shrubs, even a small silvery pond where ducks placidly floated. He looked back and saw a large but still oddly quaint home perched at the top of a gentle slope, and when he saw its Victorian lines, he suddenly knew where he was. "This is the old Wyndham home."

"Yep, Nottingham's finest. So what happened exactly? Your dad had a falling out with this side of the family?"

He nodded, trying to remember when he'd last been here. Was he what, five? Must have been. He liked his great Aunt Deliah, he felt safe with her - she was one of the few that could stand up to his father. That's probably why the falling out occurred, and he never saw her - or her magnificent house - again. "My father eventually alienated everyone. He had a … bad temper."

"I think the term you're searching for is psychopath, but we can leave it there if you want."

Wesley glanced over at Bob, but he was just smiling benignly, waiting for him to take over the conversation. Did he need to tell Bob anything? He could read his mind, yes? So there was no point in talking about any of this. It was then that he noticed his hand was back; his wrist no longer ended in a charred stump. "What's going on here?" he asked, sure he was missing something fundamental.

"Had a chit-chat with the Powers - which, by the way, _thrills_ them. They just love hearing from me. Anyhoo, it was decided you kinda qualified as working for them. So, mazel tov."

"What?"

"It's a Yiddish -"

"Stop being a smart ass," he snapped impatiently. "What the fuck does that mean?"

Bob sighed, but in a slightly humorous way, like he thought this was basically funny. It wasn't, but okay. He was the god here, he could find this funny if he wanted to. "It means the afterlife dearth has been rectified. You've been touched by the PTB's - in a roundabout way - so you get a little pocket of this dimension for yourself. And this seemed to be the place you most wanted to be, so here we are."

Wesley took this in, getting it and not quite getting it at the same time. "You're serious? Just because Logan talked to you?"

"No. He just pointed out an injustice. You've done good work for a long time. You deserve something for that."

Wesley rubbed his temple, like that might help him understand this. "It happens just like that?"

"What did you expect, Morris dancing? It's all in who you know, really, and you know just the right people. And others." Bob gave him a toothy grin that was almost menacing as he stood up and gestured towards the house. "This is all yours, mate. Enjoy."

"I've done some horrible things," he blurted, suddenly feeling unworthy of this.

Bob chuckled. "Join the club. If perfection was the point, no one would have an afterlife. Although don't tell the religious fanatics - they'll be terribly disappointed to figure out it's intent that counts, not abstinence or being holier than thou. You fought the good fight. The problem is, it's a war, and wars get ugly. But at the end of the day, you gave your life - twice - for humanity. What's more worthy than that?" Bob patted him on the shoulder, and Wesley suddenly felt like crying. He didn't, though; he managed to hold it together.

"Thank -" he began, but when he looked up, Bob was gone. He looked around, but he was nowhere on the grounds. Or at least nowhere that Wesley could see him.

He shoved himself off the bench, briefly marveling at having two hands again as well as the ability to feel objects, and started walking towards the house.

No, not the house - _his _house. Wesley felt the tiniest flutter in his stomach, a combination of nerves and happiness, and smiled to himself.

* * *

**THE END**


End file.
